I am scarcely more bookish than he, and at the time I thought him a cruel rationalist despite all his pleasant little phrases.
XXXV
AT times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and grey, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man.
Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:
"Still that is not all—not all."
Someone, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you say?"
He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking on the terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and Yelpatievsky, he said: "What are you talking about?"
"Plehve."
"Plehve . . . Plehve . . . ," he repeated musingly after a pause, as though he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself like a bird, and said, with a faint smile:
"To-day from early morning I have had a silly
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