Nekhludoff stood silent, looking with no kindly feelings at the immovable, pale mask of a face before him.

“And I shall give orders that these measures should be revoked and the people reinstated in their homes.”

“So that I need not make use of this petition?”

“I promise you most assuredly,” answered Toporoff, laying a stress on the word I, as if quite convinced that his honesty, his word was the best guarantee.  “It will be best if I write at once.  Take a seat, please.”

He went up to the table and began to write.  As Nekhludoff sat down he looked at the narrow, bald skull, at the fat, blue-veined hand that was swiftly guiding the pen, and wondered why this evidently indifferent man was doing what he did and why he was doing it with such care.

“Well, here you are,” said Toporoff, sealing the envelope; “you may let your clients know,” and he stretched his lips to imitate a smile.

“Then what did these people suffer for?” Nekhludoff asked, as he took the envelope.

Toporoff raised his head and smiled, as if Nekhludoff’s question gave him pleasure.  “That I cannot tell.  All I can say is that the interests of the people guarded by us are so important that too great a zeal in matters of religion is not so dangerous or so harmful as the indifference which is now spreading—­”

“But how is it that in the name of religion the very first demands of righteousness are violated—­families are separated?”

Toporoff continued to smile patronisingly, evidently thinking what Nekhludoff said very pretty.  Anything that Nekhludoff could say he would have considered very pretty and very one-sided, from the height of what he considered his far-reaching office in the State.

“It may seem so from the point of view of a private individual,” he said, “but from an administrative point of view it appears in a rather different light.  However, I must bid you good-bye, now,” said Toporoff, bowing his head and holding out his hand, which Nekhludoff pressed.

“The interests of the people!  Your interests is what you mean!” thought Nekhludoff as he went out.  And he ran over in his mind the people in whom is manifested the activity of the institutions that uphold religion and educate the people.  He began with the woman punished for the illicit sale of spirits, the boy for theft, the tramp for tramping, the incendiary for setting a house on fire, the banker for fraud, and that unfortunate Lydia Shoustova imprisoned only because they hoped to get such information as they required from her.  Then he thought of the sectarians punished for violating Orthodoxy, and Gourkevitch for wanting constitutional government, and Nekhludoff clearly saw that all these people were arrested, locked up, exiled, not really because they transgressed against justice or behaved unlawfully, but only because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the property they had taken away from