Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.

“I am reasonable.  I am even—­permit me to say—­a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought—­devil knows what foreign notions.  But I am not an intellectual mongrel.  I think like a Russian.  I think faithfully—­and I take the liberty to call myself a thinker.  It is not a forbidden word, as far as I know.”

“No.  Why should it be a forbidden word?” Councillor Mikulin turned in his seat with crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table propped his head on the knuckles of a half-closed hand.  Razumov noticed a thick forefinger clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-red stone—­a signet ring that, looking as if it could weigh half a pound, was an appropriate ornament for that ponderous man with the accurate middle-parting of glossy hair above a rugged Socratic forehead.

“Could it be a wig?” Razumov detected himself wondering with an unexpected detachment.  His self-confidence was much shaken.  He resolved to chatter no more.  Reserve!  Reserve!  All he had to do was to keep the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination, when the questions came.  Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers.

Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly.  Razumov’s self-confidence abandoned him completely.  It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.  Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing else.  He made an effort to brace himself up.  It was a failure.  But Councillor Mikulin was surprisingly detached too.

“Why should it be forbidden?” he repeated.  “I too consider myself a thinking man, I assure you.  The principal condition is to think correctly.  I admit it is difficult sometimes at first for a young man abandoned to himself—­with his generous impulses undisciplined, so to speak—­at the mercy of every wild wind that blows.  Religious belief, of course, is a great....”

Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with gloomy discontent—­

“That man, Haldin, believed in God.”

“Ah!  You are aware,” breathed out Councillor Mikulin, making the point softly, as if with discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly enough, as if he too were put off his guard by Razumov’s remark.  The young man preserved an impassive, moody countenance, though he reproached himself bitterly for a pernicious fool, to have given thus an utterly false impression of intimacy.  He kept his eyes on the floor.  “I must positively hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak,” he admonished himself.  And at once against his will the question, “Hadn’t I better tell him everything?” presented itself with such force that he had to bite his lower lip.  Councillor Mikulin could not, however, have nourished any hope of confession.  He went on—­