Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures, clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps, pondering.

“Not all patricians,” he muttered at last.  “But you, at any rate, are one of us.”

Razumov smiled bitterly.

“To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer,” he said in a sneering tone.  “I am not a democratic Jew.  How can I help it?  Not everybody has such luck.  I have no name, I have no....”

The European celebrity showed a great concern.  He stepped back a pace and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost entreating.  His deep bass voice was full of pain.

“But, my dear young friend!” he cried.  “My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch....”

Razumov shook his head.

“The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I have no legal right to—­but what of that?  I don’t wish to claim it.  I have no father.  So much the better.  But I will tell you what:  my mother’s grandfather was a peasant—­a serf.  See how much I am one of you.  I don’t want anyone to claim me.  But Russia can’t disown me.  She cannot!”

Razumov struck his breast with his fist.

“I am it!”

Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered.  Razumov followed, vexed with himself.  That was not the right sort of talk.  All sincerity was an imprudence.  Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he thought, with despair.  Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction.  His imagination dwelt on that atrocity in spite of himself.  It was as if he were becoming light-headed.  “It is not what is expected of me,” he repeated to himself.  “It is not what is—­I could get away by breaking the fastening on the little gate I see there in the back wall.  It is a flimsy lock.  Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me.  Oh yes.  The hat!  These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing.  They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade—­but I would be gone and no one could ever...Lord!  Am I going mad?” he asked himself in a fright.

The great man was heard—­musing in an undertone.

“H’m, yes!  That—­no doubt—­in a certain sense....”  He raised his voice.  “There is a deal of pride about you....”

The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring, acknowledging, in a way, Razumov’s claim to peasant descent.

“A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo.  And I don’t say that you have no justification for it.  I have admitted you had.  I have ventured to allude to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance to it.  You are one of us—­un des notres.  I reflect on that with satisfaction.”