“I’ll tell you what you think,” he said explosively, but not raising his voice.  “You think that you are dealing with a secret accomplice of that unhappy man.  No, I do not know that he was unhappy.  He did not tell me.  He was a wretch from my point of view, because to keep alive a false idea is a greater crime than to kill a man.  I suppose you will not deny that?  I hated him!  Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth.  Their Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a contempt for the secular logic of human development.”

Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared.  “What a tirade!” he thought.  The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him.  The bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an idol with dim, unreadable eyes.  Razumov’s voice changed involuntarily.

“If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as Haldin, I would answer you—­there is nothing sentimental in it.  I did not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder.  Abhorrence is not hate.  I hated him simply because I am sane.  It is in that character that he outraged me.  His death...”

Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat.  The dimness of Councillor Mikulin’s eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it indistinct to Razumov’s sight.  He tried to disregard these phenomena.

“Indeed,” he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, “what is his death to me?  If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his breast....  The fellow is a mere phantom....”

Razumov’s voice died out very much against his will.  Mikulin behind the table did not allow himself the slightest movement.  The silence lasted for some little time before Razumov could go on again.

“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.