“Phew-ew!” Lichonin let out a long-drawn whistle and chanted in a thin, dismal voice, nodding in time with his head hanging down to one side:  “The philosopher is off on our usual stuff:  ’A rope—­is a common cord.’”

“Of course, there’s nothing easier than to play the tom-fool,” responded Yarchenko.  “But in my opinion there is not in the sorrowful life of Russia a more mournful phenomenon than this lackadaisicalness and vitiation of thought.  To-day we will say to ourselves:  Eh!  It’s all the same, whether I go to a brothel or whether I do not go, from this one time things will get neither worse nor better.  And after five years we will be saying:  Undoubtedly a bribe is a horribly nasty bit of business, but you know—­children ... the family ...  And just the same way after ten years we, having remained fortuitous Russian liberals, will be sighing about personal freedom and bowing low before worthless scoundrels, whom we despise, and will be cooling our heels in their ante-rooms.  ‘Because, don’t you know,’ we will say, tittering, ‘when you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf.’  By God, it wasn’t in vain that some minister called the Russian students future head-clerks!”

“Or professors,” Lichonin put in.

“But most important of all,” continued Yarchenko, letting this pointed remark pass by, “most important of all is this, that I have seen all of you to-day on the river and afterwards there ... on the other shore ... with these charming, fine girls.  How attentive, well-bred, obliging you all were—­but scarcely have you taken leave of them, when you are drawn to public women.  Let each one of you imagine for a moment, that we all had been visiting his sisters and straight from them had driven to Yama ...  What?  Is such a supposition pleasant?”

“Yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of society,” pompously remarked Boris Sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat supercilious and affected young man, upon whom the short, white summer uniform jacket, which scarcely covered his fat posteriors, the modish trousers, of a military cut, the pince-nez on a broad, black ribbon, and a cap after a Prussian model, all bestowed the air of a coxcomb.  “Surely, it isn’t more respectable to enjoy the caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry on an intrigue on the side with another man’s wife?  What am I to do if woman is indispensable to me!”

“Eh, very indispensable indeed!” said Yarchenko with vexation and feebly made a despondent gesture.

But here a student who was called Ramses in the friendly coterie intervened.  This was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a broad forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald spots at the temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin.  He led a mode of life sufficiently queer for a student.  While his colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in