He remembers why he has come out, to get some newspapers to read what has been written about the murders. He enters a spacious and clean restaurant and orders tea and newspapers. Suddenly, as he searches the newspapers, the head clerk of the police station that he has recently visited on a matter not related to the murders, sits down smiling at his table. Zametov tells him that he has visited him recently at his room when he was lying on his couch sleeping. Raskolnikov talks to him strangely and insultingly. He accuses him of drinking champagne at others expense. He accuses him of taking money corruptly and profiting from everything. Zametov has sat down for friendly conversation and tells Raskolnikov he is speaking strangely and must still be unwell. The conversation goes on back and forth argumentatively with no normal human connection between the murderer and the police official. They begin on the subject that Raskolnikov has just been reading about in the newspapers, the murders of the two women. Raskolnikov gives a long description of what he would have done if he were the murderer to hide the objects that were stolen from the dead pawnbroker. But he describes to Zametov in great detail how he actually hid the objects under a stone without admitting to Zametov that he was the murderer and as though he were simply imagining for Zametov’s benefit how he would have hidden the objects. Zametov calls him a madman because he is fed up with Raskolnikov’s wild, strange imaginings. “‘And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?’ he said suddenly and – realized what he had done.” Zametov decides Raskolnikov is merely joking or playing with him maliciously and refuses to believe him. But Raskolnikov has really said it! He has gotten the truth in his mind out in the company of men! It jolts him and he soon leaves the restaurant. “He went out, trembling all over from a sort of wild hysterical sensation, in which there was an element of insufferable rapture.” But this touch of sudden, intense life comes from a daring intentional act of the mind not from a sudden touch of remorse in the soul.
A series of accidents happen to Raskolnikov but his behavior is so intentional, intentional to the extreme, that when he sees evidence that a young girl, Sonya, the daughter of Marmeladov, possesses something infinitely gentle and unworldly in her soul, some hidden spiritual power that protects her from the world around her – – even when Raskolnikov sees clearly that such a spirit lives within her and he also understands that because of what is in her soul he himself is permanently joined to the young woman forever, even at such a moment that has all the appearance of a miracle, it does not affect his feelings because his rational madness, even in the face of a miracle, will not let him set his soul free.