So be it! So be it! ‘Behold the man!’ Excuse me, young man, can you . . . No, to put it more strongly and more distinctly; not can you but dare you, looking upon me, assert that I am not a pig?”

The young man did not answer a word.

“Well,” the orator began again persistently and with even more dignity, after waiting for the laughter in the room to subside. “Well, so be it, I am a pig, but she is a lady! I have the semblance of a beast, but Katerina Ivanovna, my spouse, is a person of education and an officer’s daughter. Granted, granted, I am a scoundrel, but she is a woman of a noble heart, full of sentiments, refined by education. And yet . . . oh, if only she pitied me! Dear sir, dear sir, you know every man ought to have at least one place where people pity him! But Katerina Ivanovna, though she is generous, she is unjust . . . And yet, although I realize that when she pulls my hair she does it merely out of pity—for I repeat without being ashamed, she pulls my hair, young man,” he declared with redoubled dignity, hearing the sniggering again—“but, my God, if she would but once . . . But no, no! It’s all in vain and it’s no use talking! No use talking! For more than once, my wish did come true and more than once she has taken pity on me but . . . such is my trait and I am a beast by nature!”

“Rather!” assented the innkeeper yawning. Marmeladov struck his fist resolutely on the table.

“Such is my trait! Do you know, sir, do you know, I have sold her very stockings for drink? Not her shoes—that would be more or less in the order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink! Her mohair shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own property, not mine; and we live in a cold room and she caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too. We have three little children and Katerina Ivanovna is at work from morning till night; she is scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she’s been used to cleanliness from childhood. But her chest is weak and she has a tendency to consumption and I feel it! Do you suppose I don’t feel it? And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink, to find sympathy and feeling in drink . . . I drink because I want to suffer profoundly!” And as though in despair he laid his head down on the table.

“Young man,” he went on, raising his head again, “in your face I seem to read some kind of sorrow. When you came in I read it, and that was why I addressed you at once. For in unfolding to you the story of my life, I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners, who indeed know all about it already, but I am looking for a man of feeling and education. Know then that my wife was educated in a high-class school for the daughters of noble-men, and on leaving she danced the shawl dance before the governor and other personages, for which she was presented with a gold medal and a certificate of merit. The medal .