Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street.  He was firmly decided.  Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision.  He had simply discovered what he had meant to do all along.  And yet he felt the need of some other mind’s sanction.

With something resembling anguish he said to himself—­

“I want to be understood.”  The universal aspiration with all its profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open himself.

The attorney was not to be thought of.  He despised the little agent of chicane too much.  One could not go and lay one’s conscience before the policeman at the corner.  Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief of his district’s police—­a common-looking person whom he used to see sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering cigarette stuck to his lower lip.  “He would begin by locking me up most probably.  At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful commotion,” thought Razumov practically.

An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.

Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support.  Who knows what true loneliness is—­not the conventional word, but the naked terror?  To the lonely themselves it wears a mask.  The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.  Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant.  For an instant only.  No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

Razumov had reached that point of vision.  To escape from it he embraced for a whole minute the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings and flinging himself on his knees by the side of the bed with the dark figure stretched on it; to pour out a full confession in passionate words that would stir the whole being of that man to its innermost depths; that would end in embraces and tears; in an incredible fellowship of souls—­such as the world had never seen.  It was sublime!

Inwardly he wept and trembled already.  But to the casual eyes that were cast upon him he was aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll.  He noted, too, the sidelong, brilliant glance of a pretty woman—­with a delicate head, and covered in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and beautiful savage—­which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking tenderness on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.

Suddenly Razumov stood still.  The glimpse of a passing grey whisker, caught and lost in the same instant, had evoked the complete image of Prince K—–­, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man had pressed it—­a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a half-unwilling caress.

And Razumov marvelled at himself.  Why did he not think of him before!