, unpedantic, though genuine,
learning, but occasionally they sat on him severely. Once, on arriving
late at a political meeting, he hastily began excusing himself. "Paklin
was afraid!" some one sang out from a corner of the room, and everyone
laughed. Paklin laughed with them, although it was like a stab in his
heart. "He is right, the blackguard!" he thought to himself. Nejdanov he
had come across in a little Greek restaurant, where he was in the
habit of taking his dinner, and where he sat airing his rather free
and audacious views. He assured everyone that the main cause of his
democratic turn of mind was the bad Greek cooking, which upset his
liver.

"I wonder where our host has got to?" he repeated. "He has been out of
sorts lately. Heaven forbid that he should be in love!"

Mashurina scowled.

"He has gone to the library for books. As for falling in love, he has
neither the time nor the opportunity."

"Why not with you?" almost escaped Paklin's lips.

"I should like to see him, because I have an important matter to talk
over with him," he said aloud.

"What about?" Ostrodumov asked. "Our affairs?"

"Perhaps yours; that is, our common affairs."

Ostrodumov hummed. He did not believe him. "Who knows? He's such a busy
body," he thought.

"There he is at last!" Mashurina exclaimed suddenly, and her small
unattractive eyes, fixed on the door, brightened, as if lit up by an
inner ray, making them soft and warm and tender.

The door opened, and this time a young man of twenty-three, with a cap
on his head and a bundle of books under his arm, entered the room. It
was Nejdanov himself.

II

AT the sight of visitors he stopped in the doorway, took them in at a
glance, threw off his cap, dropped the books on to the floor, walked
over to the bed, and sat down on the very edge. An expression of
annoyance and displeasure passed over his pale handsome face, which
seemed even paler than it really was, in contrast to his dark-red, wavy
hair.

Mashurina turned away and bit her lip; Ostrodumov muttered, "At last!"

Paklin was the first to approach him.

"Why, what is the matter, Alexai Dmitritch, Hamlet of Russia? Has
something happened, or are you just simply depressed, without any
particular cause?

"Oh, stop! Mephistopheles of Russia!" Nejdanov exclaimed irritably. "I
am not in the mood for fencing with blunt witticisms just now."

Paklin laughed.

"That's not quite correct. If it is wit, then it c