R- frowned. “What? What? Well, if you insist I’ll tell you. I was busy with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An idiot⁠—and to be frank, one of our poets.⁠ ⁠… For two years we all lived side by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am a genius! And I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense.⁠ ⁠… But it is not a thing to talk about.”

The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise now?”

A moment of awkward asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter but I was certain there was something.⁠ ⁠…

“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.