Part 2, Chapter 10 — the five-rouble note in the snow

Liza dresses. The Underground Man paces the room in frenzied impatience. He cannot bear that she is still in the flat; he cannot bear that she is leaving. As she walks toward the door he runs after her, seizes her hand, opens it, thrusts something in it, then turns and dashes to the far corner so as not to see what she does. The thing he has put in her hand is a crumpled blue five-rouble note. He admits, narrating, that he did it from spite — to convert her presence in his flat from the gift of a person into the payment of a transaction.

She is gone before he can turn around. The outer glass door slams. He stands by the table. The five-rouble note is on the table — crumpled, the same one. She has flung it down on her way out. He cannot endure it. He runs out of the flat without putting on his coat, down the stairs, into the street. The wet snow is falling in masses, covering the empty street as if with a pillow. He runs to the crossroads two hundred paces away. He stops.

Where had she gone? And why was I running after her? he asks. To fall down before her, to kiss her feet. He longed for that. But — what for? he thinks. Should I not begin to hate her tomorrow precisely because I had kissed her feet today? He stands in the snow at the crossroads. He turns back. He never sees Liza again. He tries, in the final paragraphs, to stop writing. He cannot stop. The editor's bracketed note closes the book on his behalf: "[The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.]"