It was there that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on
him, clung to him like a poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off.
He suffered from it exceedingly, as well as from the conversational,
commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with the other kind of students.
"They must be wondering at the change in me," he reflected anxiously. He
had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent,
nice enough fellows to go to the devil. Once a married professor he used
to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: "How is it we never see
you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" Razumov was conscious of
meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor
was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all
this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin:
a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of
the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on
his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to
haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it,
but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who had
the upper hand, in a composed sense of his own superiority. A vanquished
phantom--nothing more.
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