"It's your phrase altogether, not mine. Your own, not simply the sequel of our conversation. 'Our' conversation it was not at all. It was a teacher uttering weighty words, and a pupil who was raised from the dead. I was that pupil and you were the teacher." "But, if you remember, it was just after my words you joined their society, and only afterwards went away to America." "Yes, and I wrote to you from America about that. I wrote to you about everything. Yes, I could not at once tear my bleeding heart from what I had grown into from childhood, on which had been lavished all the raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred.... It is difficult to change gods. I did not believe you then, because I did not want to believe, I plunged for the last time into that sewer.... But the seed remained and grew up. Seriously, tell me seriously, didn't you read all my letter from America, perhaps you didn't read it at all?" "I read three pages of it. The two first and the last. And I glanced through the middle as well. But I was always meaning..." "Ah, never mind, drop it! Damn it!" cried Shatov, waving his hand. "If you've renounced those words about the people now, how could you have uttered them then?... That's what crushes me now." "I wasn't joking with you then; in persuading you I was perhaps more concerned with myself than with you," Stavrogin pronounced enigmatically. "You weren't joking! In America I was lying for three months on straw beside a hapless creature, and I learnt from him that at the very time when you were sowing the seed of God and the Fatherland in my heart, at that very time, perhaps during those very days, you were infecting the heart of that hapless creature, that maniac Kirillov, with poison... you confirmed false malignant ideas in him, and brought him to the verge of insanity.... Go, look at him now, he is your creation... you've seen him though." "In the first place, I must observe that Kirillov himself told me that he is happy and that he's good. Your supposition that all this was going on at the same time is almost correct. But what of it? I repeat, I was not deceiving either of you." "Are you an atheist? An atheist now?" "Yes." "And then?" "Just as I was then." "I wasn't asking you to treat me with respect when I began the conversation. With your intellect you might have understood that," Shatov muttered indignantly. "I didn't get up at your first word, I didn't close the conversation, I didn't go away from you, but have been sitting here ever since submissively answering your questions and... cries, so it seems I have not been lacking in respect to you yet." Shatov interrupted, waving his hand. "Do you remember your expression that 'an atheist can't be a Russian,' that 'an atheist at once ceases to be a Russian'? Do you remember saying that?" "Did I?" Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch questioned him back.