'Me afraid of nobody———!' Paklin was beginning.
'Who could have betrayed Basanov?' Nezhdanov went on. ' I don't understand it!'
'Why, to be sure, a friend. They're grand hands at that─friends are. You must be on the look-out with them! I, for instance, had a friend, and a capital fellow he seemed; thought such a lot of me, of my reputation! One day he came to me. . . . "Fancy!" he cried, "the ridiculous slanders they've been spreading about you; they declare you poisoned your own uncle; that you were introduced into some house, and at once took a seat with your back to the lady of the house, and persisted in sitting so the whole evening! And that she fairly cried, yes, cried at the insult! What absurdity! what inanity! what fools can believe such a story?" And what followed? Why, a year later I quarrelled with that very friend. . . . And he writes in a letter of farewell: "You who killed your own uncle! You who were not ashamed to insult a respectable lady by sitting with your back to her! . . ." and so on, and so on. That's what friends are!'
Ostrodumov exchanged glances with Mashurina. 'Alexey Dmitrievitch!' he blurted in his heavy bass─he obviously wanted to cut short the useless eruption of words that was begin-
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