y and a
contempt for the secular logic of human development."

Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought.
The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The
bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an
idol with dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov's voice changed involuntarily.

"If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as
Haldin, I would answer you--there is nothing sentimental in it. I did
not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder. Abhorrence is
not hate. I hated him simply because I am sane. It is in that character
that he outraged me. His death..."

Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat. The dimness of
Councillor Mikulin's eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it
indistinct to Razumov's sight. He tried to disregard these phenomena.

"Indeed," he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, "what is his
death to me? If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his
breast.... The fellow is a mere phantom...."

Razumov's voice died out very much against his will. Mikulin behind the
table did not allow himself the slightest movement. The silence lasted
for some little time before Razumov could go on again.

"He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
other's rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young
Guards' officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery.
...Upon my Word,"--Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of
Ziemianitch, lowered his voice forcibly,--"upon my word, we Russians are
a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves
wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or
set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know?
To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in
a desert one must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the
grog-shop, falls on your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
something about your appearance has taken his fancy, what then--kindly
tell me? You may break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
succeed in beating him off...."

Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
deliberately.

"That's... of course," he said in an undertone.

The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. R