Mitya told him how he had stained the cuff fussing over Grigory, and how he had tucked it under when he washed his hands at Perkhotin’s.

“We shall have to take your shirt, too, it’s very important ... as material evidence.” Mitya flushed and became furious.

“What, am I to stay naked?” he cried.

“Don’t worry ... We’ll do something about it ... and meanwhile may I also trouble you to take off your socks?” “You must be joking! Is it really so necessary?” Mitya flashed his eyes.

“This is no time for joking,” Nikolai Parfenovich parried sternly.

“Well, if you need it ... I ... ,” Mitya muttered, and having sat down on the bed, he began taking his socks off. He felt unbearably awkward: everyone else was dressed, and he was undressed, and—strangely—undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become lower than all of them, and that they now had every right to despise him. “If everyone is undressed, it’s not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it’s a disgrace!” flashed again and again through his mind. “It’s like a dream, I’ve dreamed of being disgraced like this.” But to take his socks off was even painful for him: they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And above all he did not like his own feet; all his life for some reason he had found both his big toes ugly, especially the right one with its crude, flat toenail, somehow curved under, and now they would all see it. This unbearable shame suddenly made him, deliberately now, even more rude. He tore his shirt off.

“Would you like to look anywhere else, if you’re not ashamed to?”

“No, sir, not just now.”

“So, what, am I to stay naked like this?” he added fiercely.

“Yes, it is necessary just now ... May I trouble you to sit down here for now, you can take a blanket from the bed and wrap yourself, and I ... I’ll see to everything.”

All the articles were shown to the witnesses, the report of the examination was drawn up, and Nikolai Parfenovich finally went out, and the clothes were taken out after him. Ippolit Kirillovich also went out. Only the peasants remained with Mitya, and stood silently, not taking their eyes off him. Mitya wrapped himself in a blanket; he was cold. His bare feet stuck out, and he kept trying unsuccessfully to pull the blanket over them so as to cover them. Nikolai Parfenovich did not come back for a long time, “painfully long.” “He treats me like a pup,” Mitya ground his teeth. “That rotten prosecutor left, too, must be from contempt, he got disgusted looking at a naked man.” Mitya still supposed that his clothes would be examined elsewhere and then brought back. How great was his indignation when Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly returned with quite different clothes, brought in after him by a peasant.

“Well, here are some clothes for you,” he said casually, apparently quite pleased with the success of his expedition. “Mr. Kalganov has donated them for this curious occasion, as well as a clean shirt for you. Fortunately, he happened to have it all in his suitcase. You may keep your own underwear and socks.” Mitya boiled over.

“I don’t want other people’s clothes!” he thundered. “Give me mine!”

“Impossible.”

“Give me mine! Devil take Kalganov, him and his clothes!”

They reasoned with him for a long time. Anyway, they somehow calmed him down. They convinced him that his own clothes, being stained with blood, must “join the collection of material evidence,” and to leave them on him “no longer even fell within their rights ... in view of how the case might end.” Mitya somehow finally understood this. He lapsed into a gloomy silence and began hurriedly getting dressed. He merely observed, as he was putting the clothes on, that they were more costly than his old ones, and that he did not want “to gain by it.” And besides, “they’re embarrassingly tight. Shall I play the buffoon in them ... for your pleasure?”

Again he was convinced that here, too, he was exaggerating, that Mr. Kalganov, though taller than he, was only slightly taller, so that only the trousers might be a trifle long. But the coat did turn out to be narrow in the shoulders.

“Devil take it, I can hardly even button it,” Mitya growled again. “Do me a favor, please tell Mr. Kalganov right now that I did not ask him for his clothes, and that I’ve been gotten up like a buffoon.”

“He understands that very well, and he is sorry ... not sorry about his clothes, that is, but, as a matter of fact, about this whole case ... ,” Nikolai Parfenovich mumbled.

“I spit on his ‘sorry’! Well, where to now? Or do I go on sitting here?”

He was asked to go back to “that room.” He went back, sullen with anger, trying not to look at anyone. He felt himself utterly disgraced in another man’s clothes, even before those peasants and Trifon Borisovich, whose face lor some reason flashed in the doorway and disappeared. “He came to have a look at the mummer,” thought Mitya. He sat down on his former chair. He had the illusion of something nightmarish and absurd; it seemed to him he was not in his right mind.

“Well, what now, do you start flogging me with a birch, or what? There’s nothing else left,” he gnashed out, addressing the prosecutor. He no longer wanted even to turn towards Nikolai Parfenovich, as though he did not deign to speak with him. “He examined my socks too closely, and had them turned inside out, the scoundrel—he did it on purpose, to show everyone how dirty my underwear is!”

“Well, now we’ll have to proceed to the interrogation of the witnesses,” said Nikolai Parfenovich, as if in answer to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s question.

“Yes,” the prosecutor said thoughtfully, as if he, too, was pondering something. “We have done all we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich continued, “but having received such a radical refusal on your part to give us any explanation concerning the sources of the sum found in your possession, we, at this point...”

“What’s the stone in that ring?” Mitya suddenly interrupted, as if coming out of some sort of reverie, pointing to one of the three large rings that adorned Nikolai Parfenovich’s right hand.

“Ring?” Nikolai Parfenovich repeated in surprise.

“Yes, that one ... with the little veins in it, on your middle finger—what stone is that?” Mitya insisted somehow irritably, like a stubborn child.

“It’s a smoky topaz,” Nikolai Parfenovich smiled, “would you like to look at it? I’ll take it off...”

“No, no, don’t take it off,” Mitya cried fiercely, suddenly coming to his senses, and angry with himself. “Don’t take it off, there’s no need ... Ah, the devil ... Gentlemen, you’ve befouled my soul! Can you possibly think I’d conceal it from you if I really killed my father? That I’d hedge, and lie, and hide? No, Dmitri Karamazov is not like that, he couldn’t bear it, and if I were guilty, I swear, I wouldn’t have waited for you to come here, or for the sun to rise, as I originally intended, I’d have destroyed myself even before, without waiting for dawn! I feel that in myself now. I’ve found out more in this one cursed night than I’d have learned in twenty years of living . . .! And would I have been this way, would I have been this way on this night, and at this moment, sitting with you now, would I be talking like this, would I be moving like this, would I look at you and at the world like this, if I really were a parricide, when even the inadvertent killing of Grigory gave me no rest all night—not from fear, oh! not just from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to reveal and tell about yet another new meanness of mine, yet another new disgrace, to such scoffers as you, who do not see anything and do not believe anything, blind moles and scoffers, even if it would save me from your accusation? Better penal servitude! The one who opened the door to my father’s room and went in through that door is the one who killed him, he is the one who robbed him. Who he is, I am at a loss and at pains to say, but he is not Dmitri Karamazov, know that—and that is all I can tell you, and enough, stop badgering me ... Exile me, hang me, but don’t irritate me any more. I am silent. Call your witnesses!”