‘What next?... You, betrothed to Tatyana Petrovna, have been to see Madame Ratmirov, whom you love ... and who loves you.’
Litvinov instantly got up from the seat; the blood rushed to his head.
‘What’s this?’ he cried at last, in a voice of concentrated exasperation: ‘stupid jesting, spying? Kindly explain yourself.’
Potugin turned a weary look upon him.
‘Ah! don’t be offended at my words. Grigory Mihalitch, me you cannot offend. I did not begin to talk to you for that, and I’m in no joking humour now.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. I’m ready to believe in the excellence of your intentions; but still I may be allowed to ask you by what right you meddle in the private affairs, in the inner life, of another man, a man who is nothing to you; and what grounds you have for so confidently giving out your own ... invention for the truth?’
‘My invention! If I had imagined it, it should not have made you angry; and as for my right, well I never heard before that a man ought to ask himself whether he had the right to hold out a hand to a drowning man.’
‘I am humbly grateful for your tender solicitude,’ cried Litvinov passionately, ‘but I am not in the least in need of it, and all the phrases about the ruin of inexperienced young men wrought by society women, about the immorality of fashionable society, and so on, I look upon merely as stock phrases, and indeed in a sense I positively despise them; and so I beg you to spare your rescuing arm, and to let me drown in peace.’
Potugin again raised his eyes to Litvinov. He was breathing hard, his lips were twitching.
‘But look at me, young man,’ broke from him at last, and he clapped himself on the breast: ‘can you suppose I have anything in common with the ordinary, self-satisfied moralist, a preacher? Don’t you understand that simply from interest in you, however strong it might be, I would never have let fall a word, I would never have given you grounds for reproaching me with what I hate above all things—indiscretion, intrusiveness? Don’t you see that this is something of a different kind altogether, that before you is a man crushed, utterly obliterated by the very passion, from the results of which he would save you, and ... and for the same woman!’