From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as
though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling
in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the
world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a
mystic, a dreamer--everything that Semyonov was not. It is true that
if we mattered nothing at all to Semyonov, we also mattered nothing at
all to Nikitin, but for Nikitin there were dreams, visions, memories
and hopes. We were contented to be banished from his attention when we
were aware that happier objects detained him. We might envy him, we
could not dislike him.
Semyonov never sneered at Nikitin. From the first he left him
absolutely alone. The two men simply avoided one another in so far as
was possible in a company so closely confined as ours. From the first
they treated one another with a high and almost extravagant
politeness. As Nikitin spoke but seldom, there was little opportunity
for the manifestation of what Semyonov must have considered "his
childishly romantic mind," and Nikitin, on his side, made on no single
occasion a reply to the challenge of Semyonov's caustic cynicism.
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