phelian slant of her eyebrows.

"You suffer, Razumov," she suggested, in her low, confident voice.

"What nonsense!" Razumov faced the woman fairly. "But now I think of it,
I am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the
one over there--Madame de S--, you know. Formerly the dead were allowed
to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old
harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true that
they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But couldn't
the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity? Couldn't
she conjure him up for you?"--he jested like a man in pain.

Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
wearily, "Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea
for us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov."

"You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the
ghost of it--the cold ghost of it--still lingering in the temple. But as
to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
We mustn't, We can't. The other day I read in some paper or other an
alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.
It impresses the world. It's our prestige."

"He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;" the woman in the
crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
her black eyes never left Razumov's face. "And what for, pray? Simply
because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his
petty masculine standards. You might think he was one of these nervous
sensitives that come to a bad end. And yet," she went on, after a short,
reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, "and yet I
have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of
character, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed--you are."

The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their
eyes met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared
at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar,
quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to
him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He
was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had
a reason fo