"Not yet, but I will be in a second."
"It's bad for you with your sickness."
"Whiskey is bad for healthy people, too. Whiskey and the imagination. You, for instance, will soon be an idiot."
"I won't. Don't be uneasy."
"You will. I know mathematics. I see you are a blockhead."
"Everyone has his own mathematics," replied Piotr, disgruntled.
"Shut up!" said Sasha, slowly sipping the glass of whiskey and smelling a piece of bread. Having drained the first glass, he immediately filled another for himself.
"To-day," he began, bending his head and resting his hands on his knees, "I spoke to the general again. I made a proposition to him. I said, 'Now give me means, and I'll unearth people. I will open a literary club, and trap the very best scamps for you, all of them.' He puffed his cheeks, and stuck out his belly and said—the jackass!—'I know better what has to be done, and how it has to be done.' He knows everything. But he doesn't know that his mistress danced naked before Von Rutzen, or that his daughter had an abortion performed." He drained the second glass of whiskey, and filled the third. "Everybody's a blackguard and a skunk. It's impossible to live! Once Moses ordered 23,000 syphilitics to be killed. At that time there weren't many people, mark you. If I had the power I would destroy a million."
"Yourself first?" suggested Piotr smiling.
Sasha sniffed without answering, as if in a delirium.