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He walked, looking about him angrily and distractedly. All his

ideas now seemed to be circling round some single point, and he

felt that there really was such a point, and that now, now, he

was left facing that point--and for the first time, indeed,

during the last two months.

"Damn it all!" he thought suddenly, in a fit of ungovernable

fury. "If it has begun, then it has begun. Hang the new life!

Good Lord, how stupid it is!... And what lies I told to-day! How

despicably I fawned upon that wretched Ilya Petrovitch! But that

is all folly! What do I care for them all, and my fawning upon

them! It is not that at all! It is not that at all!"

Suddenly he stopped; a new utterly unexpected and exceedingly

simple question perplexed and bitterly confounded him.