"Clearly those people were educated folk. And see too how, as they talked of one thing and another, there cropped up the old and ever-persistent point."
"To what point are you referring?"
My companion paused a moment before he replied. Then he said:
"Can it be that you did not hear it? Did you not hear one of those people remark: 'I have a mind to surrender everything '?"
Whereafter, bending forward, and peering at me as a blind man would do, Kalinin added in a half-whisper:
"More and more are folk coming to think to themselves: 'Now must I forsake everything.' In the end I myself came to think it. For many a year did I increasingly reflect: 'Why should I be a servant? What will it ever profit me? Even if I should earn twelve, or twenty, or fifty roubles a month, to what will such earnings lead, and where will the man in me come in? Surely it would be better to do nothing at all, but just to gaze into space (as I am doing now), and let my eyes stare straight before me?'"
"By the way, what were you talking to those people about?"
"Which people do you mean?"
"The bearded man and the rest, the company in the guest-chamber?"
"Ah, THAT man I did not like—I have no fancy at all for fellows who strew their grief about the world, and leave it to be trampled upon by every chance-comer. For how can the tears of my neighbour benefit me? True, every man has his troubles; but also has every man such a predilection for his particular woe that he ends by deeming it the most bitter and remarkable grief in the universe—you may take my word for that."