“God forbid.  I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch seems to have solved the woman question pretty completely.”

Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone.  All day long he had been saying the wrong things.  It was folly, worse than folly.  It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his will.  Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a great store of secret knowledge and so much influence?  Why give her this puzzling impression?  But she did not seem inimical.  There was no anger in her voice.  It was strangely speculative.

“One does not know what to think, Razumov.  You must have bitten something bitter in your cradle.”  Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.

“H’m!  Something bitter?  That’s an explanation,” he muttered.  “Only it was much later.  And don’t you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I come from the same cradle?”

The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman revolutionist murmured, after a pause—­

“You mean—­Russia?”

He disdained even to nod.  She seemed softened, her black eyes very still, as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all its tender associations.  But suddenly she knitted her brows in a Mephistophelian frown.

“Yes.  Perhaps no wonder, then.  Yes.  One lies there lapped up in evils, watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.  They must be driven away, destroyed utterly.  In regard of that task nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful.  That’s how I came to feel in the end.  The great thing is not to quarrel amongst ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles.  Remember that, Razumov.”

Razumov was not listening.  He had even lost the sense of being watched in a sort of heavy tranquillity.  His uneasiness, his exasperation, his scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours.  It seemed to him that now they were blunted for ever.  “I am a match for them all,” he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting.  The woman revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was no one passing along the road.  He almost forgot that he was not alone.  He heard her voice again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the hesitation which had been the real reason of her prolonged silence.

“I say, Razumov!”

Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man who hears a false note.

“Tell me:  is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually attended the lectures at the University?”

An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of the question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after the flash of the fired shot.  Luckily his disengaged hand was ready to grip a bar of the gate.  He held it with a terrible force, but his presence of mind was gone.  He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy sound.