aced the alley from end
to end. Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a
glance at the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited.
With its grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from
top to bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very
well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly
rumour had it, by Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another
sort. Razumov had never seen Madame de S-- but in the carriage.

Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.

"Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people.
Now, if you ask me what are the dregs of a people--h'm--it would take
too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
that for me go to the making up of these dregs--of that which ought,
_must_ remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be subject
to discussion. But I can tell you what is _not_ the dregs. On that it
is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the
dregs; neither is its highest class--well--the nobility. Reflect on
that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection.
Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or
development, is--well--dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second thing I would
offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment there yawns
a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by
foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or cheating.
Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up."

A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
feminist. He seized Razumov's arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
shake.

"Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
up."

Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.

"Don't you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
subject?" he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased
the distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went
on strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words
and theories could never fill that ch