“You are a marvel,” Peter Ivanovich uttered.

But it was to Razumov that she gave her death’s-head smile.  Her tone was quite imperious.

“You must bring the wild young thing here.  She is wanted.  I reckon upon your success—­mind!”

“She is not a wild young thing,” muttered Razumov, in a surly voice.

“Well, then—­that’s all the same.  She may be one of these young conceited democrats.  Do you know what I think?  I think she is very much like you in character.  There is a smouldering fire of scorn in you.  You are darkly self-sufficient, but I can see your very soul.”

Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which, missing Razumov, gave him an absurd notion that she was looking at something which was visible to her behind him.  He cursed himself for an impressionable fool, and asked with forced calmness—­

“What is it you see?  Anything resembling me?”

She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.

“Some sort of phantom in my image?” pursued Razumov slowly.  “For, I suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that.  A vain thing.  There are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.”

The tenseness of Madame de S—­’s stare had relaxed, and now she looked at Razumov in a silence that became disconcerting.

“I myself have had an experience,” he stammered out, as if compelled.  “I’ve seen a phantom once.”  The unnaturally red lips moved to frame a question harshly.

“Of a dead person?”

“No.  Living.”

“A friend?”

“No.”

“An enemy?”

“I hated him.”

“Ah!  It was not a woman, then?”

“A woman!” repeated Razumov, his eyes looking straight into the eyes of Madame de S—.  “Why should it have been a woman?  And why this conclusion?  Why should I not have been able to hate a woman?”

As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman was new to him.  At that moment he hated Madame de S—.  But it was not exactly hate.  It was more like the abhorrence that may be caused by a wooden or plaster figure of a repulsive kind.  She moved no more than if she were such a figure; even her eyes, whose unwinking stare plunged into his own, though shining, were lifeless, as though they were as artificial as her teeth.  For the first time Razumov became aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was it nauseated him exceedingly.  Again Peter Ivanovitch tapped him slightly on the shoulder.  Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away when he received the unexpected favour of a bony, inanimate hand extended to him, with the two words in hoarse French—­

“Au revoir!”

He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the room, escorted by the great man, who made him go out first.  The voice from the sofa cried after them—­

“You remain here, Pierre.”

“Certainly, ma chere amie.”

But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the door behind him.  The landing was prolonged into a bare corridor, right and left, desolate perspectives of white and gold decoration without a strip of carpet.  The very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and a solitary speck reposing on the balustrade of white marble—­the silk top-hat of the great feminist—­asserted itself extremely, black and glossy in all that crude whiteness.