wide his eyes. "Do you mean to say you
said nothing of this to Yulia Mihailovna?"

"To her? Heaven forbid! Ech, Andrey Antonovitch! You see, I value her
friendship and I have the highest respect for her... and all the rest of
it... but I couldn't make such a blunder. I don't contradict her, for,
as you know yourself, it's dangerous to contradict her. I may have
dropped a word to her, for I know she likes that, but to suppose that
I mentioned names to her as I have to you or anything of that sort! My
good sir! Why am I appealing to you? Because you are a man, anyway,
a serious person with old-fashioned firmness and experience in the
service. You've seen life. You must know by heart every detail of such
affairs, I expect, from what you've seen in Petersburg. But if I were
to mention those two names, for instance, to her, she'd stir up such a
hubbub.... You know, she would like to astonish Petersburg. No, she's
too hot-headed, she really is."

"Yes, she has something of that _fougue,_" Andrey Antonovitch muttered
with some satisfaction, though at the same time he resented this
unmannerly fellow's daring to express himself rather freely about Yulia
Mihailovna. But Pyotr Stepanovitch probably imagined that he had not
gone far enough and that he must exert himself further to flatter Lembke
and make a complete conquest of him.

"_Fougue_ is just it," he assented. "She may be a woman of genius, a
literary woman, but she would scare our sparrows. She wouldn't be
able to keep quiet for six hours, let alone six days. Ech, Andrey
Antonovitch, don't attempt to tie a woman down for six days! You do
admit that I have some experience--in this sort of thing, I mean; I know
something about it, and you know that I may very well know something
about it. I am not asking for six days for fun but with an object."

"I have heard..." (Lembke hesitated to utter his thought) "I have heard
that on your return from abroad you made some expression... as it were
of repentance, in the proper quarter?"

"Well, that's as it may be."

"And, of course, I don't want to go into it.... But it has seemed to
me all along that you've talked in quite a different style--about the
Christian faith, for instance, about social institutions, about the
government even...."

"I've said lots of things, no doubt, I am saying them still; but such
ideas mustn't be applied as those fools do it, that's the point. What's
the good of biting his superior's shoulder! You