“I will never, never, abandon these bright hopes,” he used to say to me with shining eyes. Of these “bright hopes” he always spoke quietly, in a blissful half-whisper, as it were secretly. He was rather tall, but extremely thin and narrow-shouldered, and had extraordinarily lank hair of a reddish hue. All Stepan Trofimovitch’s condescending gibes at some of his opinions he accepted mildly, answered him sometimes very seriously, and often nonplussed him. Stepan Trofimovitch treated him very kindly, and indeed he behaved like a father to all of us. “You are all halfhearted chickens,” he observed to Virginsky in joke. “All who are like you, though in you, Virginsky, I have not observed that narrow-mindedness I found in Petersburg, chez ces séminaristes . But you’re a half-hatched chicken all the same. Shatov would give anything to hatch out, but he’s half-hatched too.”

“And I?” Liputin inquired.

“You’re simply the golden mean which will get on anywhere in its own way.” Liputin was offended.