“Can it be true?”
“You still don’t believe it?”
“Will you really cast me off like an old worn-out shoe?”
“I’ll see,” laughed Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. “Come, let me go.”
“Wouldn’t you like me to stand on the steps … for fear I might by chance overhear something … for the rooms are small?”
“That’s as well. Stand on the steps. Take my umbrella.”
“Your umbrella.… Am I worth it?” said the captain over-sweetly.
“Anyone is worthy of an umbrella.”
“At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights.…”
But he was by now muttering mechanically. He was too much crushed by what he had learned, and was completely thrown out of his reckoning. And yet almost as soon as he had gone out on to the steps and had put up the umbrella, there his shallow and cunning brain caught again the ever-present, comforting idea that he was being cheated and deceived, and if so they were afraid of him, and there was no need for him to be afraid.