“Yes, reported.... But aren’t they true? I can’t make out your attitude in this? Either the man is a hero to you, or...”
He approached his face with fiercely distended nostrils close to mine so suddenly that I had the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
“You ask me! I suppose it amuses you, all this. Look here! I am a worker. I studied. Yes, I studied very hard. There is intelligence here.” (He tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.) “Don’t you think a Russian may have sane ambitions? Yes—I had even prospects. Certainly! I had. And now you see me here, abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed. You see me here—and you ask! You see me, don’t you?—sitting before you.”
He threw himself back violently. I kept outwardly calm.
“Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here on account of the Haldin affair?”
His manner changed.
“You call it the Haldin affair—do you?” he observed indifferently.
“I have no right to ask you anything,” I said. “I wouldn’t presume. But in that case the mother and the sister of him who must be a hero in your eyes cannot be indifferent to you. The girl is a frank and generous creature, having the noblest—well—illusions. You will tell her nothing—or you will tell her everything. But speaking now of the object with which I’ve approached you first, we have to deal with the morbid state of the mother. Perhaps something could be invented under your authority as a cure for a distracted and suffering soul filled with maternal affection.”
His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I could not help thinking, wilfully.
“Oh yes. Something might,” he mumbled carelessly.