mind? Do you want to know what I think of you, Dmitri?
Well! I think: here is a man--with his abilities, what might he not have
attained to, what worldly advantages might he not have possessed by now,
if he had liked!... and I meet him hungry and homeless....'

'I rouse your compassion,' Rudin murmured in a choked voice.

'No, you are wrong. You inspire respect in me--that is what I feel. Who
prevented you from spending year after year at that landowner's, who was
your friend, and who would, I am fully persuaded, have made provision
for you, if you had only been willing to humour him? Why could you not
live harmoniously at the gymnasium, why have you--strange man!--with
whatever ideas you have entered upon an undertaking, infallibly every
time ended by sacrificing your personal interests, ever refusing to take
root in any but good ground, however profitable it might be?'

'I was born a rolling stone,' Rudin said, with a weary smile. 'I cannot
stop myself.'

'That is true; but you cannot stop, not because there is a worm gnawing
you, as you said to me at first.... It is not a worm, not the spirit
of idle restlessness--it is the fire of the love of truth that burns in
you, and clearly, in spite of your failings; it burns in you more hotly
than in many who do not consider themselves egoists and dare to call
you a humbug perhaps. I, for one, in your place should long ago have
succeeded in silencing that worm in me, and should have given in to
everything; and you have not even been embittered by it, Dmitri. You are
ready, I am sure, to-day, to set to some new work again like a boy.'

'No, brother, I am tired now,' said Rudin. 'I have had enough.'

'Tired! Any other man would have been dead long ago. You say that death
reconciles; but does not life, don't you think, reconcile? A man who has
lived and has not grown tolerant towards others does not deserve to meet
with tolerance himself. And who can say he does not need tolerance? You
have done what you could, Dmitri... you have struggled so long as you
could... what more? Our paths lay apart,'...

'You were utterly different from me,' Rudin put in with a sigh.

'Our paths lay apart,' continued Lezhnyov, 'perhaps exactly because,
thanks to my position, my cool blood, and other fortunate circumstances,
nothing hindered me from being a stay-at-home, and remaining a spectator
with folded hands; but you had to go out into the world, to turn up your
shirt-sleeves, to toil an