nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.
He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted. He
walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive
harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull
people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he
discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge. He slowed down
at once. To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green
slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the
picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.

He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on
slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get
out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to
his profound absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive
journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write!
A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made
up his mind to do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that
step and then had forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to
escape from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger.
He was ready to despise himself for it. What was it? Levity, or
deep-seated weakness? Or an unconscious dread?

"Is it that I am shrinking? It can't be! It's impossible. To shrink now
would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
damnation," he thought. "Is it possible that I have a conventional
conscience?"

He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street
facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that
it was there before him. But at the moment a couple of carriages and a
slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left,
following the quay again, but now away from the lake.

"It may be just my health," he thought, allowing himself a very unusual
doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment
or two, he had never been ill in his life. But that was a danger, too.
Only, it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially
remarkable way. "If I believed in an active Providence," Razumov said
to himself, amused grimly, "I would see here the working of