“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.