He even meant to give me a note to you from himself, but I forgot it." Shatov's face changed, as I recollect now.

He stood for a few seconds longer, then went out of the room.
Liza was angry.
"Does he always go out like that ?" she asked, turning to me.
I was just shrugging my shoulders when Shatov suddenly came back, went straight up to the table and put down the roll of papers he had taken.
"I'm not going to be your helper, I haven't the time...." "Why?
Why?
I think you are angry!" Liza asked him in a grieved and imploring voice.
The sound of her voice seemed to strike him; for some moments he looked at her intently, as though trying to penetrate to her very soul.
"No matter," he muttered, softly, "I don't want to...." And he went away altogether.
Liza was completely overwhelmed, quite disproportionately in fact, so it seemed to me.
"Wonderfully queer man," Mavriky Nikolaevitch observed aloud.
III He certainly was queer, but in all this there was a very great deal not clear to me.

There was something underlying it all.

I simply did not believe in this publication; then that stupid letter, in which there was an offer, only too barefaced, to give information and produce "documents," though they were all silent about that, and talked of something quite different; finally that printing-press and Shatov's sudden exit, just because they spoke of a printing-press.

All this led me to imagine that something had happened before I came in of which I knew nothing; and, consequently, that it was no business of mine and that I was in the way.