sometimes no small thing.”
The explanation was finished; Hippolyte paused at last.
There is, in extreme cases, a final stage of cynical candour when a nervous man, excited, and beside himself with emotion, will be afraid of nothing and ready for any sort of scandal, nay, glad of it. The extraordinary, almost unnatural, tension of the nerves which upheld Hippolyte up to this point, had now arrived at this final stage. This poor feeble boy of eighteen—exhausted by disease—looked for all the world as weak and frail as a leaflet torn from its parent tree and trembling in the breeze; but no sooner had his eye swept over his audience, for the first time during the whole of the last hour, than the most contemptuous, the most haughty expression of repugnance lighted up his face. He defied them all, as it were. But his hearers were indignant, too; they rose to their feet with annoyance. Fatigue, the wine consumed, the strain of listening so long, all added to the disagreeable impression which the reading had made upon them.
Suddenly Hippolyte jumped up as though he had been shot.
“The sun is rising,” he cried, seeing the gilded tops of the trees, and pointing to them as to a miracle. “See, it is rising now!”
“Well, what then? Did you suppose it wasn’t going to rise?” asked Ferdishenko.
“It’s going to be atrociously hot again all day,” said Gania, with an air of annoyance, taking his hat. “A month of this … Are you coming home, Ptitsin?” Hippolyte listened to this in amazement, almost amounting to stupefaction. Suddenly he became deadly pale and shuddered.
“You manage your composure too awkwardly. I see you wish to insult me,” he cried to Gania. “You—you are a cur!” He looked at Gania with an expression of malice.