Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main question diplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch (which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurted out in a whisper:
“Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?”
“No. Why?” He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full in the face.
She dropped her glance. “I thought I saw you there.”
“You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look so uneasy? I did not go in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?”
She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat a retreat.
“I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is about Kostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a serious matter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I was thinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boys there are children of undesirable people. One can’t be too careful these days.” She was now speaking according to her carefully considered program, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searching glance, as she asked: “You must have heard of the man the gendarmes caught, haven’t you?”
“Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth,” he said with a smile. “Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg or Moscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news.”
She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening with growing interest, like a man who had given the matter some consideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.
Finally he got up. “Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “It seems to me the trouble lies much deeper than that, mamman. Those fellows, the Nihilists, don’t amount to anything in themselves. If it were not for that everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harm than a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run by Germans; we simply can’t take care of the least thing.”