“Tell me, please,” said Lubotchka, after a brief silence—­“is it true that you are to be tried for something?”

“I?  Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer.”

“But what for?”

“For nothing, but just . . . it’s chiefly a question of politics,” yawned Pyotr Dmitritch—­“the antagonisms of Left and Right.  I, an obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use of an expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace—­Kuzma Grigoritch Vostryakov.”

Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on: 

“And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals!  Heaven forbid!  A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with your finger.”

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing particular.  The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle.  A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with insulting language and behaviour in a public place.  Everything showed that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers, and that they behaved equally badly.  If there had been insulting behaviour, the insult had anyway been mutual.  Vostryakov ought to have fined them both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the court—­that is all.  But that’s not our way of doing things.  With us what stands first is not the person—­not the fact itself, but the trade-mark and label.  However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong because he is a tavern-keeper and a money-grubber.  Vostryakov placed the tavern-keeper under arrest.  The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov’s decision.  Well, I stuck to my own opinion. . . .  Got a little hot. . . .  That was all.”

Pyotr Dmitritch spoke calmly with careless irony.  In reality the trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely.  Olga Mihalovna remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had tried to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how dissatisfied with himself.  As an intelligent man he could not help feeling that he had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and how much lying had been needful to conceal that feeling from himself and from others!  How many unnecessary conversations there had been!  How much grumbling and insincere laughter at what was not laughable!  When he learned that he was to be brought up before the Court, he seemed at once harassed and depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever at the windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers.  And he was ashamed to let his wife see that he was worried, and it vexed her.