Page 778 - the-brothers-karamazov

think, which you claimed as part of your inheritance?’
‘Three thousand! More, more,’ cried Mitya hotly; ‘more
than six thousand, more than ten, perhaps. I told everyone
so, shouted it at them. But I made up my mind to let it go
at three thousand. I was desperately in need of that three
thousand... so the bundle of notes for three thousand that I
knew he kept under his pillow, ready for Grushenka, I con-
sidered as simply stolen from me. Yes, gentlemen, I looked
upon it as mine, as my own property..’
The prosecutor looked significantly at the investigating
lawyer, and had time to wink at him on the sly.
‘We will return to that subject later,’ said the lawyer
promptly. ‘You will allow us to note that point and write it
down; that you looked upon that money as your own prop-
erty?’
‘Write it down, by all means. I know that’s another fact
that tells against me, but I’m not afraid of facts and I tell
them against myself. Do you hear? Do you know, gentle-
men, you take me for a different sort of man from what I
am,’ he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. ‘You have to
deal with a man of honour, a man of the highest honour;
above all don’t lose sight of it — a man who’s done a lot of
nasty things, but has always been, and still is, honourable
at bottom, in his inner being. I don’t know how to express
it. That’s just what’s made me wretched all my life, that I
yearned to be honourable, that I was, so to say, a martyr to a
sense of honour, seeking for it with a lantern, with the lan-
tern of Diogenes, and yet all my life I’ve been doing filthy
things like all of us, gentlemen... that is like me alone. That