and, leading him away from the zoologist, muttered in a
friendly voice that shook with emotion:

"My friends . . . dear, good . . . you've lost your tempers and
that's enough . . . and that's enough, my friends."

Hearing his soft, friendly voice, Laevsky felt that something unheard
of, monstrous, had just happened to him, as though he had been
nearly run over by a train; he almost burst into tears, waved his
hand, and ran out of the room.

"To feel that one is hated, to expose oneself before the man who
hates one, in the most pitiful, contemptible, helpless state. My
God, how hard it is!" he thought a little while afterwards as he
sat in the pavilion, feeling as though his body were scarred by the
hatred of which he had just been the object.

"How coarse it is, my God!"

Cold water with brandy in it revived him. He vividly pictured Von
Koren's calm, haughty face; his eyes the day before, his shirt like
a rug, his voice, his white hand; and heavy, passionate, hungry
hatred rankled in his breast and clamoured for satisfaction. In his
thoughts he felled Von Koren to the ground, and trampled him
underfoot. He remembered to the minutest detail all that had happened,
and wondered how he could have smiled ingratiatingly to that
insignificant man, and how he could care for the opinion of wretched
petty people whom nobody knew, living in a miserable little town
which was not, it seemed, even on the map, and of which not one
decent person in Petersburg had heard. If this wretched little town
suddenly fell into ruins or caught fire, the telegram with the news
would be read in Russia with no more interest than an advertisement
of the sale of second-hand furniture. Whether he killed Von Koren
next day or left him alive, it would be just the same, equally
useless and uninteresting. Better to shoot him in the leg or hand,
wound him, then laugh at him, and let him, like an insect with a
broken leg lost in the grass--let him be lost with his obscure
sufferings in the crowd of insignificant people like himself.

Laevsky went to Sheshkovsky, told him all about it, and asked him
to be his second; then they both went to the superintendent of the
postal telegraph department, and asked him, too, to be a second,
and stayed to dinner with him. At dinner there was a great deal of
joking and laughing. Laevsky made jests at his own expense, saying
he hardly knew how to fire off a pistol, calling himself a royal
archer and William Tell.