"Now then, drink up!" said Sanine, as in friendly fashion he passed the
bottle to Yourii.

"With pleasure," replied the latter, dejectedly, and it immediately
occurred to him that this was about the best thing, in fact the only
thing that remained to be done.

So they all drank and touched glasses. To Yourii vodka tasted horrible.
It was burning and bitter as poison. He helped himself to the hors
d'oeuvres, but these, too, had a disagreeable flavour, and he could
not swallow them.

"No!" he thought. "It doesn't matter if it's death, or Siberia, but get
away from here I must! Yet, where shall I go? Everywhere it's the same
thing, and there's no escaping from one's self. When once a man sets
himself above life, then life in any form can never satisfy him,
whether he lives in a hole like this, or in St. Petersburg."

"As I take it," cried Schafroff, "man, individually, is a mere
nothing."

Yourii looked at the speaker's dull, unintelligent countenance, with
its tired little eyes behind their glasses, and thought that such a man
as that was in truth nothing.

"The individual is a cypher. It is only they who emerge from the
masses, yet are never out of touch with them, and who do not oppose the
crowd, as bourgeois heroes usually do--it is only they who have real
strength."