“You have no better friend than Prince K—–­, and as to myself it is a long time now since I’ve been honoured by his....”

He glanced down his beard.

“I won’t detain you any longer.  We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.  We shall certainly meet once more.  It may be some little time, though, before we do.  Till then may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!” Once in the street, Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction.  At first he thought of nothing; but in a little while the consciousness of his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous, and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of that complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through his mind.

Go back!  What for?  Confess!  To what?  “I have been speaking to him with the greatest openness,” he said to himself with perfect truth.  “What else could I tell him?  That I have undertaken to carry a message to that brute Ziemianitch?  Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance of safety I have won for nothing—­what folly!”

Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin was, perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct.  To be understood appeared extremely fascinating.

On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to run out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated as if in a desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so before he could proceed on his way.  He reached his rooms at last.

Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all at once removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities, from his very room, even.  He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to himself to be existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything that had ever happened to him.  He came out of this state slowly, with an effect, that is to say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number of days was not very great.  And when he had got back into the middle of things they were all changed, subtly and provokingly in their nature:  inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl, the staircase, the streets, the very air.  He tackled these changed conditions in a spirit of severity.  He walked to and fro to the University, ascended stairs, paced the passages, listened to lectures, took notes, crossed courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard till his jaws ached.