It’s characteristic of your generation, I take a broad view of it, and don’t blame you. And let’s admit it does you honour and all the rest. But the point is again that I don’t see the point of it. There’s something about some sort of ‘sins in Switzerland.’ ‘I’m getting married,’ he says, ‘for my sins or on account of the “sins” of another,’ or whatever it is⁠—‘sins’ anyway. ‘The girl,’ says he, ‘is a pearl and a diamond,’ and, well, of course, he’s ‘unworthy of her’; it’s their way of talking; but on account of some sins or circumstances ‘he is obliged to lead her to the altar, and go to Switzerland, and therefore abandon everything and fly to save me.’ Do you understand anything of all that? However⁠ ⁠… however, I notice from the expression of your faces”⁠—(he turned about with the letter in his hand looking with an innocent smile into the faces of the company)⁠—“that, as usual, I seem to have put my foot in it through my stupid way of being open, or, as Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch says, ‘being in a hurry.’ I thought, of course, that we were all friends here, that is, your friends, Stepan Trofimovitch, your friends. I am really a stranger, and I see⁠ ⁠… and I see that you all know something, and that just that something I don’t know.” He still went on looking about him.