His greeting was most amiable.  He was wearing a rather short fur coat that only reached to a little below his knees, and the fur of the coat was of a deep rich brown, so that his pale square yellow beard contrasted with this so abruptly as to seem false.  His body was as ever thick and self-confident, and the round fur cap that he wore was cocked ever so slightly to one side.  I did not want to see him, but I was caught.  I fancied that he knew very well that I wanted to escape, and that now, for sheer perversity, he would see that I did not.  Indeed, he caught my arm and drew me out of the Market.  We passed into the dusky streets.

“Now, Ivan Andreievitch,” he said, “this is very pleasant... very....  You elude me, you know, which is unkind with two so old acquaintances.  Of course I know that you dislike me, and I don’t suppose that I have the highest opinion of you, but, nevertheless, we should be interested in one another.  Our common experience....”  He broke off with a little shiver, and pulled his fur coat closer around him.

I knew that all that I wanted was to break away.  We had passed quickly on leaving the Market into some of the meanest streets of Petrograd.  This was the Petrograd of Dostoeffsky, the Petrograd of “Poor Folk” and “Crime and Punishment” and “The Despised and Rejected."...  Monstrous groups of flats towered above us, and in the gathering dusk the figures that slipped in and out of the doors were furtive shadows and ghosts.  No one seemed to speak; you could see no faces under the spare pale-flamed lamps, only hear whispers and smell rotten stinks and feel the snow, foul and soiled under one’s feet....

“Look here, Semyonov,” I said, slipping from the control of his hand, “it’s just as you say.  We don’t like one another, and we know one another well enough to say so.  Neither you nor I wish to revive the past, and there’s nothing in the present that we have in common.”

“Nothing!” He laughed.  “What about my delightful nieces and their home circle?  You were always one to shrink from the truth, Ivan Andreievitch.  You fancy that you can sink into the bosom of a charming family and escape the disadvantages....  Not at all.  There are always disadvantages in a Russian family. I am the disadvantage in this one.”  He laughed again, and insisted on taking my arm once more.  “If you feel so strongly about me, Durward” (when he used my surname he always accented the second syllable very strongly) “all you have to do is to cut my niece Vera out of your visiting list.  That, I imagine, is the last thing that you wish.  Well, then—­”

“Vera Michailovna is my friend,” I said hotly—­it was foolish of me to be so easily provoked, but I could not endure his sneering tone.  “If you imply—­”

“Nonsense,” he answered sharply, “I imply nothing.  Do you suppose that I have been more than a month here without discovering the facts?  It’s your English friend Lawrence who is in love with Vera—­and Vera with him.”