ptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling
troubled. Personally he ought to have felt reassured. There was an
obvious advantage in this conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for
what he was not. But was it not strange?

Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of
his hands by Haldin's revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and laborious
existence had been destroyed--the only thing he could call his own on
this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?

What infuriated him most was to feel that the "thinkers" of the
University were evidently connecting him with Haldin--as a sort of
confidant in the background apparently. A mysterious connexion! Ha ha!
...He had been made a personage without knowing anything about it. How
that wretch Haldin must have talked about him! Yet it was likely that
Haldin had said very little. The fellow's casual utterances were caught
up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not
all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and
lies?

"Impossible to think of anything else," muttered Razumov to himself.
"I'll become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are
murdering my intelligence."

He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of
his intelligence.

He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement
which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an
official-looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik.

"A gendarme brought it," said the man. "He asked if you were at home.
I told him 'No, he's not at home.' So he left it. 'Give it into his own
hands,' says he. Now you've got it--eh?"

He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope
in hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course
this official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A
suspect! A suspect!

He stared in dreary astonishment at the absurdity of his position. He
thought with a sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years of good
work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardized--turned from
hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves
into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break
through. Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady's back is
turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man's name,
clothed in flesh-