ive, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met
imparted their impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I
form my own opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out
of the common. That's positively so. You are close, very close. This
taciturnity, this severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in
you, inspires hopes and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There
is something of a Brutus...."

"Pray spare me those classical allusions!" burst out Razumov nervously.
"What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
say," he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, "that the Russian
revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?"

Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps,
pondering.

"Not _all_ patricians," he muttered at last. "But you, at any rate, are
one of _us_."

Razumov smiled bitterly.

"To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer," he said in a sneering tone. "I
am not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck.
I have no name, I have no...."

The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace
and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.

"But, my dear young friend!" he cried. "My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch...."

Razumov shook his head.

"The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I
have no legal right to--but what of that? I don't wish to claim it.
I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my
mother's grandfather was a peasant--a serf. See how much I am one of
_you_. I don't want anyone to claim me. But Russia _can't_ disown me.
She cannot!"

Razumov struck his breast with his fist.

"I am _it_!"

Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity
was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he
thought, with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark
glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he
fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but
with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on
that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming
light-headed. "It is not what is expected of me," he rep