re excellent and he alone, of all the members of the
organization, dared attend the balls given in high society, without
running the risk of being recognized as an outsider.

But for a long time, altogether unnoticed by his comrades, there had
ripened in his soul a dark contempt for mankind; contempt mingled
with despair and painful, almost deadly fatigue. By nature rather a
mathematician than a poet, he had not known until now any inspiration,
any ecstasy and at times he felt like a madman, looking for the squaring
of a circle in pools of human blood. The enemy against whom he struggled
every day could not inspire him with respect. It was a dense net of
stupidity, treachery and falsehood, vile insults and base deceptions.
The last incident which seemed to have destroyed in him forever the
desire to live, was the murder of the provocateur which he had committed
by order of the organization. He had killed him in cold blood, but when
he saw that dead, deceitful, now calm, and after all pitiful, human
face, he suddenly ceased to respect himself and his work. Not that
he was seized with a feeling of repentance, but he simply stopped
appreciating himself. He became uninteresting to himself, unimportant,
a dull stranger. But being a man of strong, unbroken will-power, he did
not leave the organization. He remained outwardly the same as before,
only there was something cold, yet painful in his eyes. He never spoke
to anyone of this.

He possessed another rare quality: just as there are people who have
never known headaches, so Werner had never known fear. When other people
were afraid, he looked upon them without censure but also without any
particular compassion, just as upon a rather contagious illness from
which, however, he himself had never suffered. He felt sorry for his
comrades, especially for Vasya Kashirin; but that was a cold, almost
official pity, which even some of the judges may have felt at times.

Werner understood that the execution was not merely death, that it was
something different,--but he resolved to face it calmly, as something not
to be considered; to live until the end as if nothing had happened
and as if nothing could happen. Only in this way could he express his
greatest contempt for capital punishment and preserve his last freedom
of the spirit which could not be torn away from him. At the trial--and
even his comrades who knew well his cold, haughty fearlessness would
perhaps not have believed th