“Curse him,” said Razumov to himself, “he is waiting behind his spectacles for me to give myself away.”  Then aloud, with a satanic enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the great man—­

“Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew—­no, which drove me towards you!  The irresistible force.”

He did not feel any desire to laugh now.  This time Peter Ivanovitch moved his head sideways, knowingly, as much as to say, “Don’t I?” This expressive movement was almost imperceptible.  Razumov went on in secret derision—­

“All these days you have been trying to read me, Peter Ivanovitch.  That is natural.  I have perceived it and I have been frank.  Perhaps you may think I have not been very expansive?  But with a man like you it was not needed; it would have looked like an impertinence, perhaps.  And besides, we Russians are prone to talk too much as a rule.  I have always felt that.  And yet, as a nation, we are dumb.  I assure you that I am not likely to talk to you so much again—­ha! ha!—­”

Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a little nearer to the great man.

“You have been condescending enough.  I quite understood it was to lead me on.  You must render me the justice that I have not tried to please.  I have been impelled, compelled, or rather sent—­let us say sent—­towards you for a work that no one but myself can do.  You would call it a harmless delusion:  a ridiculous delusion at which you don’t even smile.  It is absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember these words, I hope.  Enough of this.  Here I stand before you-confessed!  But one thing more I must add to complete it:  a mere blind tool I can never consent to be.”

Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared for, he was not prepared to have both his hands seized in the great man’s grasp.  The swiftness of the movement was aggressive enough to startle.  The burly feminist could not have been quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov treacherously up on the landing and bundle him behind one of the numerous closed doors near by.  This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his hands being released after a darkly eloquent squeeze, he smiled, with a beating heart, straight at the beard and the spectacles hiding that impenetrable man.

He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his handwriting), “I won’t move from here till he either speaks or turns away.  This is a duel.”  Many seconds passed without a sign or sound.

“Yes, yes,” the great man said hurriedly, in subdued tones, as if the whole thing had been a stolen, breathless interview.  “Exactly.  Come to see us here in a few days.  This must be gone into deeply—­deeply, between you and me.  Quite to the bottom.  To the...And, by the by, you must bring along Natalia Victorovna—­you know, the Haldin girl....

“Am I to take this as my first instruction from you?” inquired Razumov stiffly.