tle finical and unnecessarily supercilious, stopped
Lichonin and called him to one side.

"I'm surprised at you, Lichonin," he said squeamishly. "We have
gathered together in our own close company, yet you must needs drag in
some vagabond. The devil knows who he is!"

"Quit that, Borya," answered Lichonin amicably. "He's a warm-hearted
fellow."

CHAPTER IX.

"Well now, gentlemen, this isn't fit for pigs," Yarchenko was saying,
grumblingly, at the entrance of Anna Markovna's establishment. "If we
finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and
not some wretched hole. Really, gentlemen, let's better go to Treppel's
alongside; there it's clean and light, at any rate."

"If you please, if you please, signior," insisted Lichonin, opening the
door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and
spreading his arms before him. "If you please."

"But this is an abomination ... At Treppel's the women are
better-looking, at least."

Ramses, walking behind, burst into dry laughter.

"So, so, Gavrila Petrovich. Let us continue in the same spirit. Let us
condemn the hungry, petty thief who has stolen a five-kopeck loaf out
of a tray, but if the director of a bank has squandered somebody else's
million on race horses and cigars, let us mitigate his lot."

"Pardon me, but I do not understand this comparison," answered
Yarchenko with restraint. "However, it's all the same to me; let's go."

"And all the more so," said Lichonin, letting the subprofessor pass
ahead; "all the more so, since this house guards within it so many
historical traditions. Comrades! Decades of student generations gaze
upon us from the heights of the coat-hooks, and, besides that, through
the power of the usual right, children and students pay half here, as
in a panopticon. Isn't that so, citizen Simeon?"

Simeon did not like to have people come in large parties--this always
smacked of scandal in the not distant future; moreover, he despised
students in general for their speech, but little comprehensible to him,
for their propensity towards frivolous jokes, for their godlessness,
and chiefly because they were in constant revolt against officialdom
and order. It was not in vain that on the day when on the Bessarabian
Square the cossacks, meat-sellers, flour dealers and fish mongers were
massacring the students, Simeon having scarce found it out had jumped
into a fine carriage passing by, and, standing just like a