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Updated: May 11, 2025
Good day." Paklin bowed to the company in general and went out into the street completely crushed and humiliated. Heavens! this contempt had utterly broken him. "Good God! What am I? A coward, a traitor?" he thought, in unutterable despair. "Oh, no, no! I am an honest man, gentlemen! I have still some manhood left!"
It was a little slow at first, but soon grew livelier. Paklin amused them very much by relating the well known Gogol anecdote about a superintendent of police, who managed to push his way into a church already so packed with people that a pin could scarcely drop, and about a pie which turned out to be no other than this same superintendent himself.
He had not, however, taken him to the study, but had asked him, with the same polite firmness, to wait in the drawing-room until he was wanted. Even here Paklin had hoped to escape, but a robust gendarme at Kollomietzev's instruction appeared in the doorway; so Paklin remained. "I dare say you've guessed what has brought me to you, Voldemar," Sipiagin began.
"Paklin was afraid!" some one sang out from a corner of the room, and everyone laughed. Paklin laughed with them, although it was like a stab in his heart. "He is right, the blackguard!" he thought to himself. Nejdanov he had come across in a little Greek restaurant, where he was in the habit of taking his dinner, and where he sat airing his rather free and audacious views.
Nejdanov, whom I strongly suspect of dangerous ideas and theories " "Un rouge a tous crins," Kollomietzev put in. "Yes, dangerous ideas and theories," Sipiagin repeated more emphatically. "He must certainly know something about this propaganda. He is... in hiding, as I have been informed by Mr. Paklin, in the merchant Falyaeva's factory "
The host met the young people with his characteristic awkwardness, bustle, and much giggling. He was delighted to see Paklin as the latter had predicted and asked of him "Is he one of us? Of course he is! I need not have asked," he said, without waiting for a reply.
Some sort of legend must be invented you remember Dmitrius the pretender some sort of royal sign must be shown him, branded on the breast." "Just like Pugatchev," Sipiagin interrupted him in a tone of voice which seemed to imply that he had not yet forgotten his history and that it was really not necessary for Paklin to go on.
Sipiagin glanced at him once or twice over his clean-shaven cheek, and with a pompous deliberation pulled out of a side-pocket a silver cigar-case with a curly monogram and a Slavonic band and offered him... really offered him a cigar, holding it gently between the second and third fingers of a hand neatly clad in an English glove of yellow dogskin. "I don't smoke," Paklin muttered. "Really!"
He wrapped his cloak more closely about him and seated himself in his elegant carriage with the hood thrown back. Valentina Mihailovna, still in her night garments, peeped out from behind the half-open shutters of her bedroom. Sipiagin waved his hand to her from the carriage. "Are you quite comfortable, Mr. Paklin? Go on!" "Je vous recommande mon frere, epargnez-le!" Valentina Mihailovna said.
Paklin," Sipiagin pronounced with the same relentless precision, "I admire that feeling of friendship which prompts you to deny it." Do you suppose that the feeling of kinship is less strong in me than your feeling of friendship? But there is another feeling, my dear sir, yet stronger still, which guides all our deeds and actions, and that is duty!"
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