“That’s it.  Retributive.  No pity!” was the conclusion of her silence.  And this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating sentences—­

“Listen to my story, Razumov!...”  Her father was a clever but unlucky artisan.  No joy had lighted up his laborious days.  He died at fifty; all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood of his sons.  No protection, no guidance!  What had society to say to him?  Be submissive and be honest.  If you rebel I shall kill you.  If you steal I shall imprison you.  But if you suffer I have nothing for you—­nothing except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread—­but no consolation for your trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your miserable life.

And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died.  He died in the hospital.  Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence—­she saw it whole.  She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of the humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of a society which nothing can absolve.

“Yes, Razumov,” she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, “it was like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed not the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great social iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied sufferings.  From that moment I was a revolutionist.”

Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance.  She, with an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice since he had come in contact with the woman, went on—­

“As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system exhorted such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the secret societies as soon as I knew how to find my way.  I was sixteen years old—­no more, Razumov!  And—­look at my white hair.”

In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness.  The bitterness too was gone.

“There is a lot of it.  I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of a girl.  Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that there was the first step towards crushing the social infamy.  Crush the Infamy!  A fine watchword!  I would placard it on the walls of prisons and palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that empty sky for a sign of hope and terror—­a portent of the end....”

“You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna,” Razumov interrupted suddenly.  “Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in water....”

She was checked but not offended.  “Who knows?  Very soon it may become a fact written all over that great land of ours,” she hinted meaningly.  “And then one would have lived long enough.  White hair won’t matter.”