Book 2 Chapter 21 The Appeal Dismissed

As soon as the Senators were seated round the table in the
debating-room, Wolf began to bring forward with great animation
all the motives in favour of a repeal. The chairman, an
ill-natured man at best, was in a particularly bad humour that
day. His thoughts were concentrated on the words he had written
down in his memoranda on the occasion when not he but Viglanoff
was appointed to the important post he had long coveted. It was
the chairman, Nikitin's, honest conviction that his opinions of
the officials of the two upper classes with which he was in
connection would furnish valuable material for the historians. He
had written a chapter the day before in which the officials of
the upper classes got it hot for preventing him, as he expressed
it, from averting the ruin towards which the present rulers of
Russia were driving it, which simply meant that they had prevented
his getting a better salary. And now he was considering what a
new light to posterity this chapter would shed on events.

"Yes, certainly," he said, in reply to the words addressed to him
by Wolf, without listening to them.

Bay was listening to Wolf with a sad face and drawing a garland
on the paper that lay before him. Bay was a Liberal of the very
first water. He held sacred the Liberal traditions of the sixth
decade of this century, and if he ever overstepped the limits of
strict neutrality it was always in the direction of Liberalism.
So in this case; beside the fact that the swindling director, who
was prosecuting for libel, was a bad lot, the prosecution of a
journalist for libel in itself tending, as it did, to restrict
the freedom of the press, inclined Bay to reject the appeal.