ntal accent, "to keep that circumstance altogether to myself."

He had passed beyond the turn leading to his lodgings, and had reached
a wide and fashionable street. Some shops were still open, and all the
restaurants. Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur
coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an
air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere
believer for the frivolous crowd. It was the world--those officers,
dignitaries, men of fashion, officials, members of the Yacht Club. The
event of the morning affected them all. What would they say if they knew
what this student in a cloak was going to do?

"Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can.
How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?"

Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided.
Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered
what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some
other mind's sanction.

With something resembling anguish he said to himself--

"I want to be understood." The universal aspiration with all its
profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst
eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open
himself.

The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of
chicane too much. One could not go and lay one's conscience before the
policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief
of his district's police--a common-looking person whom he used to see
sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering
cigarette stuck to his lower lip. "He would begin by locking me up most
probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful
commotion," thought Razumov practically.

An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.

Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who
knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked
terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable
outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal
conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant
only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without
going mad.

Razumov had reached that point of vision. To escape from it he embraced
for a whole minute the delirious purpose o