understood that,"
Shatov muttered indignantly.

"I didn't get up at your first word, I didn't close the conversation,
I didn't go away from you, but have been sitting here ever since
submissively answering your questions and... cries, so it seems I have
not been lacking in respect to you yet."

Shatov interrupted, waving his hand.

"Do you remember your expression that 'an atheist can't be a Russian,'
that 'an atheist at once ceases to be a Russian'? Do you remember saying
that?"

"Did I?" Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch questioned him back.

"You ask? You've forgotten? And yet that was one of the truest statements
of the leading peculiarity of the Russian soul, which you divined. You
can't have forgotten it! I will remind you of something else: you said
then that 'a man who was not orthodox could not be Russian.'"

"I imagine that's a Slavophil idea."

"The Slavophils of to-day disown it. Nowadays, people have grown
cleverer. But you went further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was
not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to
the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that
Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth,
Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole
Western world. You pointed out that if France is in agonies now it's
simply the fault of Catholicism, for she has rejected the iniquitous God
of Rome and has not found a new one. That's what you could say then! I
remember our conversations."

"If I believed, no doubt I should repeat it even now. I wasn't lying
when I spoke as though I had faith," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch pronounced
very earnestly. "But I must tell you, this repetition of my ideas in the
past makes a very disagreeable impression on me. Can't you leave off?"

"If you believe it?" repeated Shatov, paying not the slightest attention
to this request. "But didn't you tell me that if it were mathematically
proved to you that the truth excludes Christ, you'd prefer to stick to
Christ rather than to the truth? Did you say that? Did you?"

"But allow me too at last to ask a question," said Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch, raising his voice. "What is the object of this
irritable and... malicious cross-examination?"

"This examination will be over for all eternity, and you will never hear
it mentioned again."

"You keep insisting that we are outside the limits of time and space."

"Hold your tongue!" Shatov cried