Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new attitude.

“Ah! h’m!  You are naturally the proper person—­la personne indiquee.  Every one shall be wanted presently.  Every one.”

He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who had lowered his eyes.

“The moment of action approaches,” he murmured.

Razumov did not look up.  He did not move till he heard the door of the drawing-room close behind the greatest of feminists returning to his painted Egeria.  Then he walked down slowly into the hall.  The door stood open, and the shadow of the house was lying aslant over the greatest part of the terrace.  While crossing it slowly, he lifted his hat and wiped his damp forehead, expelling his breath with force to get rid of the last vestiges of the air he had been breathing inside.  He looked at the palms of his hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.

He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an independent sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole person very distinctly indeed.  “This is curious,” he thought.  After a while he formulated his opinion of it in the mental ejaculation:  “Beastly!” This disgust vanished before a marked uneasiness.  “This is an effect of nervous exhaustion,” he reflected with weary sagacity.  “How am I to go on day after day if I have no more power of resistance—­moral resistance?”

He followed the path at the foot of the terrace.  “Moral resistance, moral resistance;” he kept on repeating these words mentally.  Moral endurance.  Yes, that was the necessity of the situation.  An immense longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept everything clean out of his mind for a moment.  “Is it possible that I am but a weak creature after all?” he asked himself, in sudden alarm.  “Eh!  What’s that?”

He gave a start as if awakened from a dream.  He even swayed a little before recovering himself.

“Ah!  You stole away from us quietly to walk about here,” he said.

The lady companion stood before him, but how she came there he had not the slightest idea.  Her folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.

“I have been unconscious as I walked, it’s a positive fact,” said Razumov to himself in wonder.  He raised his hat with marked civility.

The sallow woman blushed duskily.  She had her invariably scared expression, as if somebody had just disclosed to her some terrible news.  But she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without timidity.  “She is incredibly shabby,” he thought.  In the sunlight her black costume looked greenish, with here and there threadbare patches where the stuff seemed decomposed by age into a velvety, black, furry state.  Her very hair and eyebrows looked shabby.  Razumov wondered whether she were sixty years old.  Her figure, though, was young enough.  He observed that she did not appear starved, but rather as if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps and leavings of plates.