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In its early days this band had been looked upon with awe by all the fellows of our course, and had had its exploits much discussed. Of these exploits the leading heroes had been Zuchin and, towards the end of the term, Semenoff, but the latter had come to be generally shunned, and to cause disturbances on the rare occasions when he attended a lecture. This is how it was.
At that time he had not understood why Semenoff attached importance to futile things such as boating or the comely shape of a girl, while deliberately refusing to be interested in the loftiest and most profound conceptions.
Prince Serge Wolkonsky; his ability and versatility; his tour de force at the farewell dinner given me at St. Petersburg; his lectures in the United States. Russian scientific men. Woeikoff. Admiral Makharoff. Senator Semenoff and Prince Gregory Galitzin. Mendeleieff. Two salons. Other attractions. General Ignatieff. Princess Ourousoff and her answer to Alexander III. Princess Radzivill.
Yourii then spoke of the feeling that actually existed among the students and of what they considered most important and essential. He began simply and impassively, but by degrees let himself go, expressing himself with fervour and point. Semenoff said nothing, and listened. Then Yourii deplored the lack of revolutionary spirit among the masses. It was plain that he felt this deeply.
Sure enough, the grey-haired Semenoff who had comforted me so much at my first examination by being worse dressed than myself, and who, after passing the second examination, had attended his lectures regularly during the first month, had disappeared thereafter from view, and never been seen at the University throughout the latter part of the course. "Where is he?" asked some one.
Then he sought to live in seclusion, to become absorbed in himself, and in solitude to suffer, having full, steadfast consciousness of his impending doom. Yet, as in his life and his daily surroundings, all remained the same as formerly, it seemed absurd to imagine that it could be otherwise, or that he, Semenoff, would no longer exist as at the present.
"Anatole Pavlovitch says that he will die to-night or to-morrow morning," replied Dubova, in a dull voice. "Shall we go to him?" whispered Sina. "Or do you think that we had better not? I don't know." This was the question uppermost in the minds of them all. Should they go and see Semenoff die? Was it a right or wrong thing to do?
The company of roisterers of which Zuchin had been the leader since its formation at the beginning of the term consisted of eight students, among whom, at first, had been numbered Ikonin and Semenoff; but the former had left under the strain of the continuous revelry in which the band had indulged in the early part of the term, and the latter seceded later for reasons which were never wholly explained.
The home government now concluded to despatch the fag-ends of its navy, though Rojdestvensky would have preferred to push ahead without waiting for such "superfluous encumbrances" to join. Ships, as his staff officer Semenoff afterward wrote, were needed, but not "old flatirons and galoshes"; guns, but not "holes surrounded by iron."
Dubova had spoken of his terror because she herself was terrified, assuming that, if the healthy dreaded death, the dying must dread it far more. His pallor and his wild look, the result of loss of blood and weakness, she took to be an expression of fear. But, in reality this was not so. At all times, and especially since he knew that he had got consumption, Semenoff had dreaded death.
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