"Vermin, indeed!" I cried hotly, for I could no longer restrain myself. "And what know you of these vermin of whom you speak with such assurance? What know you of their inner lives, of their sanctified homes, of their patient sufferings? Have you penetrated to their hearths and seen the beautiful _naïveté_ of their lives, their simple faith in God's protection, though it may well seem illusion, their unselfish domesticity, their sublime scorn of temptation, their fidelity to the faith of their ancestors, their touching celebrations of fast and festival, their stanchness to one another, their humble living and their high respect for things intellectual, their unflinching toil from morn till eve for a few kopecks of gain, their heroic endurance of every form of torment, vilification, contempt--?" I felt myself bursting into tears and broke from the breakfast table. Paul followed me to my room in amazement. In the midst of all my tempest of emotion I was no less amazed at my own indiscretion. "What is the matter with you?" he said, clasping his arm around my neck. "Why make yourself so hot over this accursed race, for whom, from some strange whim or spirit of perverseness, you stand up to-day for the first time in my recollection?" "It is true; why indeed?" I murmured, striving to master myself. After all, the picture I had drawn was as ideal in its beauty as Paul's in its ugliness. "_Nu_, I only wanted you to remember that they were human beings." "_Ach_, there is the pity of it," persisted Paul; "that human beings should fall so low. And who has been telling you of all these angelic qualities you roll so glibly off your tongue?" "No one," I answered. "Then you have invented them. Ha! ha! ha!" And Paul went off into a fit of good-humoured laughter. That laughter was a sword between his life and mine, but I let a responsive smile play across my features, and Paul went to his own room in higher spirits than ever. We met again at dinner, and again at our early supper, but Paul was too full of his book, and I of my own thoughts to permit of a renewal of the dispute. Even a saint, I perceive, has his touch of egotism, and behind all Paul's talk of Russia's ideals, of the misconceptions of their fatherland's function by feather-brained Nihilists and Democrats possessed of that devil, the modern spirit, there danced, I am convinced, a glorified vision of St. Paul floating down the vistas of the future, with a nimbus of Russian ideals around his head. If he has only put them as eloquently into his book as he talks of them he will at least be read. But I have bred a bigot.