"He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
other's rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young
Guards' officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery.
...Upon my Word,"--Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of
Ziemianitch, lowered his voice forcibly,--"upon my word, we Russians are
a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves
wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or
set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know?
To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in
a desert one must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the
grog-shop, falls on your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
something about your appearance has taken his fancy, what then--kindly
tell me? You may break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
succeed in beating him off...."
Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
deliberately.
"That's... of course," he said in an undertone.
The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. Razumov
remembered his intention of making him show his hand.
"I have said all this to Prince K---," he began with assumed
indifference, but lost it on seeing Councillor Mikulin's slow nod of
assent.
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