..."
I understood quite well what she meant. We strolled on slowly. I
refrained from looking at her. And it was as if answering my own
thoughts that I murmured--
"No doubt it was a great friendship--as you say. And that young man
ended by welcoming your name, so to speak, with both hands. After that,
of course, you would understand each other. Yes, you would understand
each other quickly."
It was a moment before I heard her voice.
"Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words. A reserved man--even when
he is strongly moved."
Unable to forget---or even to forgive--the bass-toned expansiveness of
Peter Ivanovitch, the Archpatron of revolutionary parties, I said that
I took this for a favourable trait of character. It was associated with
sincerity--in my mind.
"And, besides, we had not much time," she added.
"No, you would not have, of course." My suspicion and even dread of the
feminist and his Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help asking
with real anxiety, which I made smiling--
"But you escaped all right?"
She understood me, and smiled too, at my uneasiness.
"Oh yes! I escaped, if you like to call it that. I walked away quickly.
There was no need to run. I am neither frightened nor yet fascinated,
like that poor woman who received me so strangely.
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