-horses were always stamping their hoofs
on the asphalt. A very humble-looking door, studded with iron, led
from the yard into a room with walls discoloured by damp and scrawled
over with charcoal, lighted up by a narrow window covered by an
iron grating. Then on the left was another room larger and cleaner
with an iron stove and a couple of chairs, though it, too, had a
prison window: this was the office, and from it a narrow stone
staircase led up to the second storey, where the principal room
was. This was rather a large room, but owing to the perpetual
darkness, the low-pitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and bales,
and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it, it made
as unpleasant an impression on a newcomer as the others. In the
offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales, in bundles and
in cardboard boxes on the shelves; there was no order nor neatness
in the arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels, ends of
fringe, had not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper
parcels, no one could have guessed what was being bought and sold
here. And looking at these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one
would have believed that a million was being made out of such trash,
and that fifty men were employed every day in this warehouse, not
counting the buyers.

When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went
into the warehouse, the workmen packing the goods were hammering
so loudly that in the outer room and the office no one heard him
come in. A postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle
of letters in his hand; he was wincing at the noise, and he did not
notice Laptev either. The first person to meet him upstairs was his
brother Fyodor Fyodorovitch, who was so like him that they passed
for twins. This resemblance always reminded Laptev of his own
personal appearance, and now, seeing before him a short, red-faced
man with rather thin hair, with narrow plebeian hips, looking so
uninteresting and so unintellectual, he asked himself: "Can I really
look like that?"

"How glad I am to see you!" said Fyodor, kissing his brother and
pressing his hand warmly. "I have been impatiently looking forward
to seeing you every day, my dear fellow. When you wrote that you
were getting married, I was tormented with curiosity, and I've
missed you, too, brother. Only fancy, it's six months since we saw
each other. Well? How goes it? Nina's very bad? Awfully bad?"

"Aw