Pagina 20 de 2288

And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's,

and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for

the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading

article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless

in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to

swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government

ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on

the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that

fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of

traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another

article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill,

and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his

characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each

innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it

was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain

satisfaction.