of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
businesslike manner that she went on--

"You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I
set my eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich. Oh! You are full of bitter
revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may
become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
justice which armed your and Haldin's hands to strike down that
fanatical brute...for it was that--nothing but that! I have been
thinking it out. It could have been nothing else but that."

Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
sinister immobility of feature.

"I can't speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive
justice."

"Good, that," he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As
if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be
changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at
the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for
arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted
through Razumov's head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand,
the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had
such a weight in the "active" section of every party. She was much more
representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric,
mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave
him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own
mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the
purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical
theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting
in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in
that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous
lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a
thoughtful frown.

"That's it. Retributive. No pity!" was the conclusion of her silence.
And this once broken, she wen