"I believe in her power. She was stronger than you," I answered.
"I'm sure that you like to think so," he said laughing.
"She is still stronger than you...."
"So you are a mystic, Mr.," he said. "Of course, with your romantic mind that is only natural. You believe, I suppose, that she is with us here in the room?"
"It cannot be of interest to you," I answered quietly, "what I believe."
"Yes, it is of interest," he replied in a voice that was friendly and humorously indulgent, as though he spoke to a child. "I find it strange—I have found it strange for many weeks now—that I should think so frequently of you. You are not a man who would naturally be interesting to me. You are an Englishman and I am not interested in Englishmen. You are sentimental, you have no idea of life as it is, you like dull things, dull safe things, you believe always in what you are told. You have no sense of humour.... You should be of no interest to me, and yet during these last weeks I have not been able to get rid of you."
"That is not my fault," I said. "I have not been so anxious for your company."
"No," he said, speaking rather thoughtfully, as though he were seriously thinking something out, "you regard me, of course, as a very bad character. I have no desire to defend myself to you. But the point is that I have found myself often thinking of you, that I have even taken trouble sometimes to be with you."
He waited as though he expected me to say something, but I was silent.
"It was perhaps that I saw that Marie Ivanovna cared for you. She gave you up to the end something that she never gave to me. That I suppose was tiresome to me."