He Gets Involved with Schoolboys

• Alyosha then heads off to Madame Khokhlakov's. On a lane to Mikhailovsky Street he encounters a group of boys, all of whom have stones in their hands. He then notices a sickly boy a few feet from them. All of a sudden the sickly boy throws a stone at one of the boys. Before he knows it, Alyosha is also hit on the shoulder by a rock.
• The boys start hurling stones at the sickly boy and Alyosha pleads with them to stop. They insist that the sickly boy attacked one of them first, stabbing a boy with a pen-knife earlier that day.
• Alyosha asks the sickly boy why he's throwing stones. The boy yells at him to leave him alone. As Alyosha turns back, the boy throws another stone at him.
• Alyosha asks the boy why he did that and the boy promptly bites him on the finger. Alyosha calmly wraps his bleeding finger in a kerchief and persists in trying to get the boy to talk to him. But the boy breaks out into tears and runs away.