Vous m'accompagnerez, n'est-ce pas ?_" "Stepan Trofimovitch, surely you're not going there again?
Think what may come of it!" With a pitiful and distracted smile, a smile of shame and utter despair, and at the same time of a sort of strange ecstasy, he whispered to me, standing still for an instant: "I can't marry to cover 'another man's sins'!" These words were just what I was expecting.

At last that fatal sentence that he had kept hidden from me was uttered aloud, after a whole week of shuffling and pretence.

I was positively enraged.
"And you, Stepan Verhovensky, with your luminous mind, your kind heart, can harbour such a dirty, such a low idea...

and could before Liputin came!" He looked at me, made no answer and walked on in the same direction.
I did not want to be left behind.

I wanted to give Varvara Petrovna my version.