“I might well be,” Ivan groaned angrily. “All my stupid ideas—outgrown, thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass—you present to me as something new!”
“There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I should fascinate you by my literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad, was it? And then that ironical tone à la Heine, eh?”
“No, I was never such a flunkey! How then could my soul beget a flunkey like you?”
“My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young Russian gentleman, a young thinker and a great lover of literature and art, the author of a promising poem entitled The Grand Inquisitor. I was only thinking of him!”
“I forbid you to speak of The Grand Inquisitor,” cried Ivan, crimson with shame.
“And the Geological Cataclysm. Do you remember? Tha
