“If you say much more, you blackguard, I’ll pound your face into a jelly!”

And when the flunkey whispered to him what I was, the son of Poloznev the architect, he became embarrassed, turned crimson, but immediately recovered himself and said:  “Devil take him.”

In the shops they palmed off on us workmen putrid meat, musty flour, and tea that had been used and dried again; the police hustled us in church, the assistants and nurses in the hospital plundered us, and if we were too poor to give them a bribe they revenged themselves by bringing us food in dirty vessels.  In the post-office the pettiest official considered he had a right to treat us like animals, and to shout with coarse insolence:  “You wait!” “Where are you shoving to?” Even the housedogs were unfriendly to us, and fell upon us with peculiar viciousness.  But the thing that struck me most of all in my new position was the complete lack of justice, what is defined by the peasants in the words:  “They have forgotten God.”  Rarely did a day pass without swindling.  We were swindled by the merchants who sold us oil, by the contractors and the workmen and the people who employed us.  I need not say that there could never be a question of our rights, and we always had to ask for the money we earned as though it were a charity, and to stand waiting for it at the back door, cap in hand.

I was papering a room at the club next to the reading-room; in the evening, when I was just getting ready to go, the daughter of Dolzhikov, the engineer, walked into the room with a bundle of books under her arm.

I bowed to her.

“Oh, how do you do!” she said, recognizing me at once, and holding out her hand.  “I’m very glad to see you.”

She smiled and looked with curiosity and wonder at my smock, my pail of paste, the paper stretched on the floor; I was embarrassed, and she, too, felt awkward.

“You must excuse my looking at you like this,” she said.  “I have been told so much about you.  Especially by Dr. Blagovo; he is simply in love with you.  And I have made the acquaintance of your sister too; a sweet, dear girl, but I can never persuade her that there is nothing awful about your adopting the simple life.  On the contrary, you have become the most interesting man in the town.”

She looked again at the pail of paste and the wallpaper, and went on: 

“I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but apparently he forgot, or had not time.  Anyway, we are acquainted all the same, and if you would come and see me quite simply I should be extremely indebted to you.  I so long to have a talk.  I am a simple person,” she added, holding out her hand to me, “and I hope that you will feel no constraint with me.  My father is not here, he is in Petersburg.”

She went off into the reading-room, rustling her skirts, while I went home, and for a long time could not get to sleep.