"My friend, it is not for you and me to enter into the history of our misfortunes. We have met in the vat of poverty to be seethed alike in the brew of unhappiness. We have sat at the same daily labour, we have shared often the same fare, but there is that in each of us which we can keep sacred from the contamination of confidence, and which will withstand even the thrusts of poverty. I mean our individual selves, the better part of us, the nobler element which has suffered, as distinguished from the grosser, which may yet enjoy. But I am wandering a little. I am afraid I sometimes do. I return to the point. For me to take advantage of your generous attempt to free me would have been to act as though I had a moral cause for flight. In other words, it would have been to acknowledge that I had committed some dishonourable action."
"It seems to me that to get away would have been the best way out of it. They would not have caught you if you had trusted to me, and if they did not catch you they could not prove anything against you."
"The suspicion would have remained, and the disgrace in my own eyes," answered the Count. "The question of physical fear is very different. I have been told that it depends upon the nerves and the action of the heart, and that courage is greatly increased by the presence of nourishment in the stomach. The same cannot be said of moral bravery, which proceeds more from the fear of seeming contemptible in our own eyes than from the wish to seem honourable in the estimation of others."
"I daresay," said Dumnoff, who was growing sleepy and who understood very little of his companion's homily.
"Precisely," replied the latter. "And yet even the question of physical courage is very complicated in the present case. It cannot be said, for instance, that you ran away from physical fear, after giving proof of such astonishing physical superiority. Your deeds this evening make the labours of Hercules dwindle to the proportions of mere mountebank's tricks."
"Was anybody badly injured?" asked Dumnoff, suddenly aroused by the pleasing recollections of the contest.
"I believe not seriously; I think I saw everybody whom you upset get on his feet sooner or later."
"Well," said Dumnoff with a sigh, "it cannot be helped. I did my best."
"I should think that you would be glad," suggested the Count. "You showed your prowess without any fatal result."
"Anything for a change in this dull life," grumbled the peasant with an air of dissatisfaction.