You
may be able to throw a light. There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town
peasant--a man who owned horses. He came to town years ago to work for
some relation as a driver and ended by owning a cab or two."
She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture:
"Wait!" Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted
her now, not to save his life. The contraction of his facial muscles had
been involuntary, a mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as
before.
"He was not a quite ordinary man of his class--it seems," she went on.
"The people of the house--my informant talked with many of them--you
know, one of those enormous houses of shame and misery...."
Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.
Razumov saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled
in snowflakes, with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining
greasily very near the ground. The ghost of that night pursued him. He
stood up to it with rage and with weariness.
"Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?" Sophia
Antonovna was anxious to know.
"Yes." Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling
into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he
probably could not have said no.
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