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trol himself.
‘It’s hot here,’ he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his
overcoat.
‘Take off your coat,’ Smerdyakov conceded.
Ivan took off his coat and threw it on a bench with trem-
bling hands. He took a chair, moved it quickly to the table
and sat down. Smerdyakov managed to sit down on his
bench before him.
‘To begin with, are we alone?’ Ivan asked sternly and im-
pulsively. ‘Can they overhear us in there?’
‘No one can hear anything. You’ve seen for yourself:
there’s a passage.’
‘Listen, my good fellow; what was that you babbled, as I
was leaving the hospital, that if I said nothing about your
faculty of shamming fits, you wouldn’t tell the investigating
lawyer all our conversation at the gate? What do you mean
by all? What could you mean by it? Were you threatening
me? Have I entered into some sort of compact with you? Do
you suppose I am afraid of you?’
Ivan said this in a perfect fury, giving him to understand
with obvious intention that he scorned any subterfuge or
indirectness and meant to show his cards. Smerdyakov’s
eyes gleamed resentfully, his left eye winked, and he at once
gave his answer, with his habitual composure and delibera-
tion. ‘You want to have everything above-board; very well,
you shall have it,’ he seemed to say.
‘This is what I meant then, and this is why I said that,
that you, knowing beforehand of this murder of your own
parent, left him to his fate, and that people mightn’t after

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