eyes, and to
cover them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table
for the matches.

"I have not been in Russia for eighteen years," said Samoylenko.
"I've forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country
more splendid than the Caucasus."

"Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death
are languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent
Caucasus strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the
choice of a chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus,
I should choose the job of chimney-sweep."

Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes
fixed dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken
temples, at his bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off
his heel, displaying a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to
pity, and probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child,
he asked:

"Is your mother living?"

"Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this
affair."

Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a
good-natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him,
with whom one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve.
What he understood in him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a
great deal and at unsuitable times; he played cards, despised his
work, lived beyond his means, frequently made use of unseemly
expressions in conversation, walked about the streets in his slippers,
and quarrelled with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna before other people--and
Samoylenko did not like this. But the fact that Laevsky had once
been a student in the Faculty of Arts, subscribed to two fat reviews,
often talked so cleverly that only a few people understood him, was
living with a well-educated woman--all this Samoylenko did not
understand, and he liked this and respected Laevsky, thinking him
superior to himself.

"There is another point," said Laevsky, shaking his head. "Only it
is between ourselves. I'm concealing it from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
for the time. . . . Don't let it out before her. . . . I got a
letter the day before yesterday, telling me that her husband has
died from softening of the brain."

"The Kingdom of Heaven be his!" sighed Samoylenko. "Why are you
concealing it from her?"

"To show her that letter would be equivalent to 'Come to church to
be married.' And we should first have to make our relations clear.
When she understands t