A profound disgust came over him.  Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking in a friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention.  And it was still about the famous letter, referring to various minute details given by her informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch.  The “victim of remorse” had been buried several weeks before her correspondent began frequenting the house.  It—­the house—­contained very good revolutionary material.  The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens of black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all the miseries that oppress mankind.  Razumov listened without hearing, gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost impossible to practice.

No.  The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this conversation.  There was no way of bringing it forward.  He regretted not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal connexion with the house might have been owned up to.  But when he left Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself.  And, anyway, who could have foreseen this woman’s “informant” stumbling upon that particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution?  Who could have foreseen?  Nobody!  “It’s a perfect, diabolic surprise,” thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna’s remarks upon the psychology of “the people,” “Oh yes—­certainly,” rather coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of confession out of her throat.

Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of relaxed tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to the subject of his uneasiness.  How it came about he could only guess, his mind being absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia Antonovna’s complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people.  For instance—­that Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been beaten by the devil.

“The devil,” repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.

“The actual devil.  The devil in person.  You may well look astonished, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken, a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable.  The wretched creature’s body was one mass of bruises.  He showed them to the people in the house.”

“But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don’t believe in the actual devil?”

“Do you?” retorted the woman curtly.  “Not but that there are plenty of men worse than devils to make a hell of this earth,” she muttered to herself.

Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold between her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away.  It was obvious that she did not make much of the story—­unless, indeed, this was the perfection of duplicity.  “A dark young man,” she explained further.  “Never seen there before, never seen afterwards.  Why are you smiling, Razumov?”