Because what he suffered then, as he kissed your brother’s hand and cried to him: ‘Forgive my papa, forgive my papa’—that only God alone knows, and I, sir. And that is how our children—I mean, not yours but ours, sir, the children of the despised but noble poor—learn the truth on earth when they’re just nine years old, sir. The rich ones—what do they know? In their whole lives they never sound such depths, and my Ilyushka, at that very moment in the square, sir, when he kissed his hand, at that very moment he went through the whole truth, sir. This truth, sir, entered into him and crushed him
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