Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

As soon as the Senators were seated round the table in the debating-room, Wolff 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 Viglánoff was appointed to the important post he had long coveted. It was the chairman, Nikítin'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 Wolff, without listening to them.