rily thrown into prison,
but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
either of investigation or of punishment.

This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
Western thought. I don't know that this danger occurred, specially, to
Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.

The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's parentage, or rather of his lack
of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. "Because I haven't that, must
everything else be taken away from me?" he thought.

He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
black face of the night. "For it is a crime," he was saying to
himself. "A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
institutions...."

A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. "I must be courageous,"
he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.

Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
footfalls.

It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
duty. S