“It proves this, that they distorted me from my childhood.”

“Well, it’s for you to straighten yourself!  What’s the good of being a man, a male animal?  And however that may be, is it possible, is it permissible, to reduce a personal, so to speak, fact to a general law, to an infallible principle?”

“How a principle?” interrupted Lavretsky; “I don’t admit—­”

“No, it is your principle, your principle,” Mihalevitch interrupted in his turn.

“You are an egoist, that’s what it is!” he was thundering an hour later:  “you wanted personal happiness, you wanted enjoyment in life, you wanted to live only for yourself.”

“What do you mean by personal happiness?”

“And everything deceived you; everything crumbled away under your feet.”

“What do you mean by personal happiness, I ask you?”

“And it was bound to crumble away.  Either you sought support where it could not be found, or you built your house on shifting sands, or—­”

“Speak more plainly, or I can’t understand you.”

“Or—­you may laugh if you like—­or you had no faith, no warmth of heart; intellect, nothing but one farthing’s worth of intellect . . . you are simply a pitiful, antiquated Voltairean, that’s what you are!”

“I’m a Voltairean?”

“Yes, like your father, and you yourself do not suspect it.”

“After that,” exclaimed Lavretsky, “I have the right to call you a fanatic.”

“Alas!” replied Mihalevitch with a contrite air, “I have not so far deserved such an exalted title, unhappily.”

“I have found out now what to call you,” cried the same Mihalevitch, at three o’clock in the morning.  “You are not a sceptic, nor a pessimist, nor a Voltairean, you are a loafer, and you are a vicious loafer, a conscious loafer, not a simple loafer.  Simple loafers lie on the stove and do nothing because they don’t know how to do anything; they don’t think about anything either, but you are a man of ideas—­and yet you lie on the stove; you could do something—­and you do nothing; you lie idle with a full stomach and look down from above and say, ’It’s best to lie idle like this, because whatever people do, is all rubbish, leading to nothing.’”

“And from what do you infer that I lie idle?” Lavretsky protested stoutly.  “Why do you attribute such ideas to me?”

“And, besides that, you are all, all the tribe of you,” continued Mihalevitch, “cultivated loafers.  You know which leg the German limps on, you know what’s amiss with the English and the French, and your pitiful culture goes to make it worse, your shameful idleness, your abominable inactivity is justified by it.  Some are even proud of it:  ‘I’m such a clever fellow,’ they say, ’I do nothing, while these fools are in a fuss.’  Yes! and there are fine gentlemen among us—­though I don’t say this as to you—­who reduce their whole life to a kind of stupor of boredom, get used to it, live in it, like—­like a mushroom in white sauce,” Mihalevitch added hastily, and he laughed at his own comparison.  “Oh! this stupor of boredom is the ruin of Russians.  Ours is the age for work, and the sickening loafer” . . .