Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume IV).djvu/115

 right to yield to the satisfaction of our personal egoism.'

This last phrase obviously displeased Bazarov; there was a flavour of philosophy, that is to say, romanticism about it, for Bazarov called philosophy, too, romanticism, but he did not think it necessary to correct his young disciple.

'No, no!' cried Pavel Petrovitch, with sudden energy. 'I'm not willing to believe that you, young men, know the Russian people really, that you are the representatives of their requirements, their efforts! No; the Russian people is not what you imagine it. Tradition it holds sacred; it is a patriarchal people; it cannot live without faith ...'

'I'm not going to dispute that,' Bazarov interrupted. 'I'm even ready to agree that in that you're right.'

'But if I am right ...'

'And, all the same, that proves nothing.'

'It just proves nothing,' repeated Arkady, with the confidence of a practised chess-player, who has foreseen an apparently dangerous move on the part of his adversary, and so is not at all taken aback by it.

'How does it prove nothing?' muttered Pavel Petrovitch, astounded. 'You must be going against the people then?'

'And what if we are?' shouted Bazarov. '