“That is so,” answered Nicholas Semyónovitch, anxious to express his own thought, with which he was particularly pleased, and not listening to the visitor—“that is so, but it must be reached by other means—not by a majority of votes, but by common consent. Look at the Mir, how it arrives at its decisions!”
“Oh, that Mir!”
“It cannot be denied,” said the doctor, “that the Slavonic nations have an outlook of their own. Take, for instance, the Polish right of veto. I don’t maintain that it is a better way …”
“One moment … I will finish what I was going to say,” began Nicholas Semyónovitch. “The Russian people have special characteristics. These characteristics …”
But here Iván, the liveried, sleepy-eyed footman, interrupted him.
“The driver is getting uneasy,” he said.
“Please tell him” (the Petersburg visitor always spoke politely to footmen, and prided himself on doing so) “that I shall soon be going, and will pay for the extra time.”
“Yes, sir.”
The footman went away, and Nicholas Semyónovitch was able to finish expressing his view. But both the visitor and the doctor had heard him express it a score of times (or, at any rate, they thought so), and began disproving it, especially the visitor, who quoted instances from history. He knew history very thoroughly.
The doctor sided with the visitor, admired his erudition, and was glad of the opportunity of becoming acquainted with him.