officialdom, from Czar down to police-sergeant. But from
every man he got the same species of servility, fawning or inimical,
born of guilty knowledge of Michael's hieroglyphic map and his
relentless use of it. And this attitude of the world, encouraged though
it was by its recipient, bred in him no desire for intimacy with any of
his kind, but only a half-indifferent, lazily calculating, contempt.

There had been a time when certain of his private
occupations--interviews with personages of wealth or influence, cryptic
conversations, resulting always, however defiant the beginning, in the
same grovelling pleas and promises--had amused and interested the cynic
most mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even
these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of
surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few
occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere
wanton freak, in unconditional release.--Preposterous indeed that the
only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning
to seem the only ones bearable to remember!

His wife, a woman for whom he had had a certain tolerant affection, but
no respect, he had probably not greatly mourned. Of friendship with his
equals, he knew nothing. So, of sheer necessity, all the personal
interest of his last years had been centered in the career of his
banished son.--And ah! How he had suffered through that son! No other
blow devised by man or God could have touched him save just the disgrace
and downfall of Ivan in Petersburg. During the months immediately
following the court-martial, the palace in Konnaia Square had been the
abode of a fiend incarnate. Servants slunk from room to room in terror
of their very lives; and the Governor-General, an Imperial Highness, had
looked forward with dire dread to his occasional necessary visits to the
chief of the Third Section. This lasted throughout the summer. Then, in
the autumn, had come sudden opportunity for vengeance, of a sort, on
Ivan's persecutor, Colonel Brodsky, whose disgrace and exile were
achieved with marvellous swiftness, and who died, fifteen years later,
in the horrible mines of Kara. Not until midwinter, however, did Prince
Michael's agents receive orders to locate, watch, and make report on the
condition of his son. It took some weeks before Ivan, half-starved,
badly clothed, living like a day-laborer, was discovered in his garr