One criticised or praised in order to justify some personal disappointment or pleasure.

There was nothing that gave our company greater pleasure than to declare in full voice that "So-and-so was a dear, most sympathetic, a fine man." Public praise was continuous and the most honest and spontaneous affair; if criticism sometimes followed with surprising quickness that was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous to the very extreme of spontaneity.

But we were not real students of one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and leave it at that.
No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply.

They admired him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some of their frankness--and that was all.
It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room directly under Nikitin.

The work had a peculiar and really unanalysable fascination for me.