“Asking questions again?”
Kirillov scanned him contemptuously.
“You see,” Pyotr Stepanovitch went on, getting angrier and angrier, and unable to take the right tone, “you want me to go away, to be alone, to concentrate yourself, but all that’s a bad sign for you—for you above all. You want to think a great deal. To my mind you’d better not think. And really you make me uneasy.”
“There’s only one thing I hate, that at such a moment I should have a reptile like you beside me.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. I’ll go away at the time and stand on the steps if you like. If you are so concerned about trifles when it comes to dying, then … it’s all a very bad sign. I’ll go out on to the steps and you can imagine I know nothing about it, and that I am a man infinitely below you.”
“No, not infinitely; you’ve got abilities, but there’s a lot you don’t understand because you are a low man.”
“Delighted, delighted. I told you already I am delighted to provide entertainment … at such a moment.”
“You don’t understand anything.”
“That is, I … well, I listen with respect, anyway.”
“You can do nothing; even now you can’t hide your petty spite, though it’s not to your interest to show it. You’ll make me cross, and then I may want another six months.” Pyotr Stepanovitch looked at his watch. “I never understood your theory, but I know you didn’t invent it for our sakes, so I suppose you would carry it out apart from us. And I know too that you haven’t mastered the idea but the idea has mastered you, so you won’t put it off.”