“Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  A few words here in this quiet corner.”

He felt Razumov’s reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm caressingly.

“No—­pray do.  I don’t want to talk to you about any of my silly scrapes.  What are my scrapes?  Absolutely nothing.  Mere childishness.  The other night I flung a fellow out of a certain place where I was having a fairly good time.  A tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from the Treasury department.  He was bullying the people of the house.  I rebuked him.  ’You are not behaving humanely to God’s creatures that are a jolly sight more estimable than yourself,’ I said.  I can’t bear to see any tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Upon my word I can’t.  He didn’t take it in good part at all.  ‘Who’s that impudent puppy?’ he begins to shout.  I was in excellent form as it happened, and he went through the closed window very suddenly.  He flew quite a long way into the yard.  I raged like—­like a—­minotaur.  The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers got under the table....  Such fun!  My dad had to put his hand pretty deep into his pocket, I can tell you.”  He chuckled.

“My dad is a very useful man.  Jolly good thing it is for me, too.  I do get into unholy scrapes.”

His elation fell.  That was just it.  What was his life?  Insignificant; no good to anyone; a mere festivity.  It would end some fine day in his getting his skull split with a champagne bottle in a drunken brawl.  At such times, too, when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas.  But he could never get any ideas into his head.  His head wasn’t worth anything better than to be split by a champagne bottle.

Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away.  The other’s tone changed to confidential earnestness.

“For God’s sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me make some sort of sacrifice.  It would not be a sacrifice really.  I have my rich dad behind me.  There’s positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket.”

And rejecting indignantly Razumov’s suggestion that this was drunken raving, he offered to lend him some money to escape abroad with.  He could always get money from his dad.  He had only to say that he had lost it at cards or something of that sort, and at the same time promise solemnly not to miss a single lecture for three months on end.  That would fetch the old man; and he, Kostia, was quite equal to the sacrifice.  Though he really did not see what was the good for him to attend the lectures.  It was perfectly hopeless.

“Won’t you let me be of some use?” he pleaded to the silent Razumov, who with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real drift of the other’s intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up the point.

“What makes you think I want to go abroad?” he asked at last very quietly.

Kostia lowered his voice.

“You had the police in your rooms yesterday.  There are three or four of us who have heard of that.  Never mind how we know.  It is sufficient that we do.  So we have been consulting together.”