and then buried himself in his reading again. The council for the
defence moved the blunt end of his pencil about the table and mused
with his head on one side. . . . His youthful face expressed nothing
but the frigid, immovable boredom which is commonly seen on the
face of schoolboys and men on duty who are forced from day to day
to sit in the same place, to see the same faces, the same walls.
He felt no excitement about the speech he was to make, and indeed
what did that speech amount to? On instructions from his superiors
in accordance with long-established routine he would fire it off
before the jurymen, without passion or ardour, feeling that it was
colourless and boring, and then--gallop through the mud and the
rain to the station, thence to the town, shortly to receive
instructions to go off again to some district to deliver another
speech. . . . It was a bore!

At first the prisoner turned pale and coughed nervously into his
sleeve, but soon the stillness, the general monotony and boredom
infected him too. He looked with dull-witted respectfulness at the
judges' uniforms, at the weary faces of the jurymen, and blinked
calmly. The surroundings and procedure of the court, the expectation
of which had so weighed on his soul while he was awaiting them in
prison, now had the most soothing effect on him. What he met here
was not at all what he could have expected. The charge of murder
hung over him, and yet here he met with neither threatening faces
nor indignant looks nor loud phrases about retribution nor sympathy
for his extraordinary fate; not one of those who were judging him
looked at him with interest or for long. . . . The dingy windows
and walls, the voice of the secretary, the attitude of the prosecutor
were all saturated with official indifference and produced an
atmosphere of frigidity, as though the murderer were simply an