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Amongst a lot of exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University, Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, third year's student in philosophy, was looked upon as a strong nature an altogether trustworthy man.
These meetings were a risk, and there was nothing more to settle. "We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch," said the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov's hand with that unreserved heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner. "There is nothing obscure between us. And I will tell you what! I consider myself fortunate in having h'm your..."
Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness. "If I don't go now, at once," thought Razumov, with a start of fear, "I shall never go." He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia thrust his cap on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he would have left the room bareheaded as he stood. He was walking out silently when a sharp cry arrested him. "Kirylo!" "What?"
He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like that, sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the rest of the night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with the samovar thumped with her fist on the door, calling out, "Kirylo Sidorovitch, please! It is time for you to get up!"
The next moment she was back in the place she had started from, with another half-turn on his part, so that they came again into the same relative positions. "Yes, yes," she said hurriedly. "I am very grateful to you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, for coming at once like this.... Only, I wish I had.... Did mother tell you?"
It was the refuse the banker's widow had left behind her. The windows without curtains had an indigent, sleepless look. In two of them the dirty yellowy-white blinds had been pulled down. All this spoke, not of poverty, but of sordid penuriousness. The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily "You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I have been shamefully robbed, positively ruined."
"You're sending me back to my pig's trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I am an unlucky beast and I shall die like a beast too. But mind it's your contempt that has done for me." Razumov went off with long strides. That this simple and grossly festive soul should have fallen too under the revolutionary curse affected him as an ominous symptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling troubled.
But I can tell you what is not the dregs. On that it is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the dregs; neither is its highest class well the nobility. Reflect on that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection. Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or development, is well dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
"He is one of our national glories," Madams de S cried out, with sudden vehemence. "All the world listens to him." "I don't know these ladies," said Razumov loudly rising from his chair. "What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I understand that she was talking to you here, in the garden, the other day." "Yes, in the garden," said Razumov gloomily.
Remorse," Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt. "Don't be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend." There was no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes seemed detached for an instant from vengeful visions. "He was a man of the people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It's something to know that."
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