Basil, who had been listening at first only with one ear and then with absorbed attention, threw his cigar away with sudden violence.
“You’re becoming indecent!” he said, and managed to say it with deceiving indifference. “I think I will retire; really, your conversation is unfit for my chaste hearing!” And he rose.
“Hear! Hear! A just and righteous man in our midst! Sit down, Palitzin, and preach us a sermon. Let’s vote him a speaking-trumpet of honor. Go on, Basil, give it to us, old boy! We deserve it! We’re a bad lot, we are!”
But Basil was inexorable. He elaborately explained that he was forced to catch his train at an unearthly hour, and that trains carrying _him_ always started on time; so _nolens-volens_, after giving him a regular ovation, they let him go, accompanying him to the very portals of the club and his waiting sleigh, around which they gathered, uttering loud cheers.
The night was exceedingly cold. A half-congealed vapor formed a little cloud around the nostrils of the three horses held in rein by his coachman; the sidewalks, quite recently swept and powdered with fine sand, as is done again and again each day in Petersburg’s luxurious quarters, showed two lines of pale gold on either side of the broad, brilliantly lighted streets, and rime lavishly broidered with innumerable paillettes every roof and projection sparkling beneath the frigid moon. It was a scene to hearten up any lover of the North; but Basil, intrenched behind his high sable collar, was not enjoying it as he should have done. For there was something he did not like slowly taking shape in his mind.
It was past eleven o’clock, but notwithstanding this fact he gave his _yèmshik_ the order to drive him to the house of a friend who had been his father’s comrade-in-arms, and had until recently held the post of Chief of Police. “He has got into the habit, while manipulating the Third Section, of never going to bed. I’ll find him as wide awake as a barrelful of mice,” thought Basil, and his previsions were fulfilled. “I must clear up a point or two, otherwise I will never rest easy again,” the Prince was saying angrily to himself, as he ascended the stairs; but when he entered the library where the General sat wrapped in a cloud of smoke, like a Buddhist image, his face was impassive.