"Don't you think that, if I had not been the optimist I am, I could not
have found in fifteen years some means to cut my throat? And, in the
last instance, there were always the walls of my cell to dash my head
against."

The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of his voice;
his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches, motionless, without a
quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as if peering, there was the same
look of confident shrewdness, a little crazy in its fixity, they must
have had while the indomitable optimist sat thinking at night in his
cell. Before him, Karl Yundt remained standing, one wing of his faded
greenish havelock thrown back cavalierly over his shoulder. Seated in
front of the fireplace, Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the
principal writer of the F. P. leaflets, stretched out his robust legs,
keeping the soles of his boots turned up to the glow in the grate. A
bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a
flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro
type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.
He wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends of a black silk tie hung
down the buttoned breast of his serge coat; and his head resting on the
back of his chair, his throat largely exposed, he raised to his lips a
cigarette in a long wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke straight up at the
ceiling.

Michaelis pursued his idea--_the_ idea of his solitary reclusion--the
thought vouchsafed to his captivity and growing like a faith revealed in
visions. He talked to himself, indifferent to the sympathy or hostility
of his hearers, indifferent indeed to their presence, from the habit he
had acquired of thinking aloud hopefully in the solitude of the four