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Lennie's tearful explanation when George finally extracts the dead mouse from his hand, after Lennie had tried unsuccessfully to hide it.

The double negative 'wasn't doin' nothing bad' encodes Lennie's intentionalist ethics—wrongness for him is a property of motive, not effect—and the participle 'strokin'' renders the act in a softened gerundive form that obscures whether the stroking occurred before or after the mouse's death. The line works as a perfect miniature of the novel's central tragedy of touch: Lennie's gentleness and his destructive force are the same gesture, and his language cannot distinguish them.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck uses Lennie to interrogate the ethical sufficiency of intention—this line's grammar of innocence demonstrates that goodwill cannot redeem a touch whose physical force exceeds its intent, a problem the novel will reprise fatally in the barn scene.