“I must set off to-morrow, my dear fellow,” he observed; “to-day if you will excuse it, we will sit up late.  I want above all to know what you are like, what are your views and convictions, what you have become, what life has taught you.” (Mihalevitch still preserved the phraseology of 1830.) “As for me, I have changed in much; the waves of life have broken over my breast—­who was it said that?—­though in what is important, essential I have not changed; I believe as of old in the good, the true:  but I do not only believe—­I have faith now, yes, I have faith, faith.  Listen, you know I write verses; there is no poetry in them, but there is truth.  I will read you aloud my last poem; I have expressed my truest convictions in it.  Listen.”  Mihalevitch fell to reading his poem:  it was rather long, and ended with the following lines: 

    “I gave myself to new feelings with all my heart,
    And my soul became as a child’s! 
    And I have burnt all I adored
    And now adore all that I burnt.”

As he uttered the two last lines, Mihalevitch all but shed tears; a slight spasm—­the sign of deep emotion—­passed over his wide mouth, his ugly face lighted up.  Lavretsky listened, and listened to him—­and the spirit of antagonism was aroused in him; he was irritated by the ever-ready enthusiasm of the Moscow student, perpetually at boiling-point.  Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed a heated argument had broken out between them, one of these endless arguments, of which only Russians are capable.  After a separation of many years spent in two different worlds, with no clear understanding of the other’s ideas or even of their own, catching at words and replying only in words, they disputed about the most abstract subjects, and they disputed as though it were a matter of life and death for both:  they shouted and vociferated so that every one in the house was startled, and poor Lemm, who had locked himself up in his room directly after Mihalevitch arrived, was bewildered, and began even to feel vaguely alarmed.

“What are you after all? a pessimist?” cried Mihalevitch at one o’clock in the night.

“Are pessimists usually like this?” replied Lavretsky.  “They are usually all pale and sickly—­would you like me to lift you with one hand?”

“Well, if you are not a pessimist you are a scepteec, that’s still worse.”  Mihalevitch’s talk had a strong flavour of his mother-country, Little Russia.  “And what right have you to be a scepteec?  You have had ill-luck in life, let us admit; that was not your fault; you were born with a passionate loving heart, and you were unnaturally kept out of the society of women:  the first woman you came across was bound to deceive you.”

“She deceived you too,” observed Lavretsky grimly.

“Granted, granted; I was the tool of destiny in it—­what nonsense I talk, though—­there is no such thing as destiny; it is an old habit of expressing things inexactly.  But what does that prove?”