“But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralised boys?”
He smiled. “But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful of boys couldn’t frighten us, could they?”
“Very well. Let us suppose you are a minister. What would you do?”
“What would I do? I shouldn’t let things come to such a pass, to begin with.”
He was tempted to cast circumspection to the winds and to thunder out his real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could not afford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with a strong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonal direction. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, only presently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. He spoke in his loud rapid way. Every now and again he would break off, fall to pacing the floor silently and listening to the sound of his own voice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remained suspended in the air.
Anna Nicolayevna—a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile of glossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch—followed him intently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon the government, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. She was at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of the Emperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and the ultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he was some kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophiles in his apparent hatred of foreigners.
“They’ll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to kill him,” he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. “And who is to blame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?”
Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.