throat, meaning to say something, but first
lighted his pipe, g azed at the moon, and then said, with pauses:

"Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and Turgenev,
Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked under and put up with
it... that's just how it is."

"Byelikov lived in the same house as I did," Burkin went on, "on the
same storey, his door facing mine; we often saw each other, and I knew
how he lived when he was at home. And at home it was the same story:
dressing-gown, nightcap, blinds, bolts, a perfect succession of
prohibitions and restrictions of all sorts, and--'Oh, I hope nothing
will come of it!' Lenten fare was bad for him, yet he could not eat
meat, as people might perhaps say Byelikov did not keep the fasts, and
he ate freshwater fish with butter--not a Lenten dish, yet one could not
say that it was meat. He did not keep a female servant for fear people
might think evil of him, but had as cook an old man of sixty, called
Afanasy, half-witted and given to tippling, who had once been an
officer's servant and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy was
usually standing at the door with his arms folded; with a deep sigh, he
would mutter always the same thing:

"'There are plenty of _them_ about nowadays!'

"Byelikov had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains. When
he went to bed he covered his head over; it was hot and stuffy; the wind
battered on the closed doors; there was a droning noise in the stove
and a sound of sighs from the kitchen--ominous sighs.... And he felt
frightened under the bed-clothes. He was afraid that something might
happen, that Afanasy might murder him, that thieves might break in, and
so he had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning, when we went
together to the high-school, he was depressed and pale, and it was
evident that the high-school full of people excited dread and aversion
in his whole being, and that to walk beside me was irksome to a man of
his solitary temperament.

"'They make a great noise in our classes,' he used to say, as
though trying to find an explanation for his depression. 'It's beyond
anything.'

"And the Greek master, this man in a case--would you believe it?--almost
got married."

Ivan Ivanovitch glanced quickly into the barn, and said:

"You are joking!"

"Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new teacher of
history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko, a Little Russian,
was appoin