"They tell us this and they tell us that. Why don't they increase our salaries instead?" "They keep frightening us, always frightening us." In the corner near Sasha about a dozen men had gathered. Yevsey quietly moved up to the group, and heard the enraptured voice of Piotr: "That's the way to speak! Twice two are four, and all are aces." "No, I'm not satisfied," said Solovyov sweetly with a prying note in his voice. "Think! What does it mean to think? Everyone may think in his own way. You should tell me what to do." "You _have_ been told!" put in Krasavin roughly and sharply. "_I_ don't understand," Maklakov declared calmly. "You?" shouted Sasha. "You lie! You do understand!" "No." "And I say you do, but you're a coward, you're a nobleman--and--and--and I know you." "Maybe," said Maklakov. "But do you know what you want?" He spoke in so cold a tone, and put so much significance into his voice, that Yevsey trembled and thought: "Will Sasha strike him?" Sasha, however, merely repeated the question in a screeching voice: "I? Do I know what I want?" "Yes." "I will tell you." Sasha raised his voice threateningly. "I am soon going to die. I have nobody to fear. I am a stranger to life. I live with hatred of good people before whom you in your thoughts crouch on your knees. Don't you know? You lie. You are a slave, a slave in your soul. A lackey, though you are a nobleman, and I am a muzhik, a perspicacious muzhik. Even though I attended the university, nothing has corrupted me." Yevsey felt that Sasha's words crawled in his heart like spiders, enmeshing him in gluey threads, squeezing him, tying him up, and drawing him to Sasha. He pressed through to the front, and stood alongside the combatants trying to see the faces of both at the same time. "I know my enemy. It's you, the gentry. You are gentlemen, even as spies. You are abhorrent everywhere, everywhere execrable, men and women, writers and spies. But I know a means for having done with you gentlemen, the gentry. I know a way. I see what ought to be done with you, how to destroy you." "That's the very point that's interesting, not your hysterics," said Maklakov thrusting his hands in his pockets. "Yes, it's interesting to you? Very well. I'll tell you." Sasha evidently wanted to sit down, for he vacillated like a pendulum. He looked around as he spoke without pause, breathless from quick utterance.