“You tired!  What a confession!  Well, there has been tea up there.  I had some.  If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the ghost of it—­the cold ghost of it—­still lingering in the temple.  But as to you being tired I can hardly believe it.  We are not supposed to be.  We mustn’t, We can’t.  The other day I read in some paper or other an alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.  It impresses the world.  It’s our prestige.”

“He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;” the woman in the crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but her black eyes never left Razumov’s face.  “And what for, pray?  Simply because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his petty masculine standards.  You might think he was one of these nervous sensitives that come to a bad end.  And yet,” she went on, after a short, reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, “and yet I have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of character, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Yes! indeed—­you are.”

The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov.  Their eyes met.  He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees.  An electric tramcar, quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle.  It seemed to him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone.  He was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation.  At any instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody’s lips.  As long as he managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down his irritability there was nothing to fear.  The only condition of success and safety was indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.

He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime.  Silently he indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral and mental remoteness.  He did not even smile when he heard her repeat the words—­

“Yes!  A strong character.”

He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not thinking of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of freedom.

“If you don’t look out,” he mumbled, still looking away, “you shall certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea.”

She was not to be shaken off in such a way.  As a matter of fact he had not expected to succeed.

“Never mind, it will be no great loss.  I mean the missing of her tea and only the ghost of it at that.  As to the lady, you must understand that she has her positive uses.  See that, Razumov.”