“Well, what now?”

“Nothing.”

“How, nothing?”

“Why, just nothing.”

“H’m. . . .  And which subject is the hardest?”

“That’s according.”  The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.

“I see—­er . . .  What is the Latin for tree?”

“Arbor.”

“Aha. . . .  And so one has to know all that,” sighs the blue trousers. 
“You have to go into it all. . . .  It’s hard work, hard work. . . . 
Is your dear Mamma well?”

“She is all right, thank you.”

“Ah. . . .  Well, run along.”

After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is horrified.

“Holy Saints, why it’s three o’clock already.  How I have been staying on.  Good-bye, I must run. . . .”

“Have dinner with me, and then go,” says Lyashkevsky.  “You have plenty of time.”

Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more than ten minutes.  After dining he sits for some five minutes on the sofa and thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head on the cushion and fills the room with a shrill whistling through his nose.  While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles: 

“Race of curs!  I wonder you don’t choke with laziness.  No work, no intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . . disgusting.  Tfoo!”

At six o’clock Finks wakes up.

“It’s too late to go to the high school now,” he says, stretching.  “I shall have to go to-morrow, and now. . . .  How about my revenge?  Let’s have one more game. . . .”

After seeing his visitor off, between nine and ten, Lyashkevsky looks after him for some time, and says: 

“Damn the fellow, staying here the whole day and doing absolutely nothing. . . .  Simply get their salary and do no work; the devil take them! . . .  The German pig. . . .”

He looks out of the window, but the native is no longer there.  He has gone to bed.  There is no one to grumble at, and for the first time in the day he keeps his mouth shut, but ten minutes passes and he cannot restrain the depression that overpowers him, and begins to grumble, shoving the old shabby armchair: 

“You only take up room, rubbishly old thing!  You ought to have been burnt long ago, but I keep forgetting to tell them to chop you up.  It’s a disgrace!”

And as he gets into bed he presses his hand on a spring of the mattress, frowns and says peevishly: 

“The con—­found—­ed spring!  It will cut my side all night.  I will tell them to rip up the mattress to-morrow and get you out, you useless thing.”

He falls asleep at midnight, and dreams that he is pouring boiling water over the natives, Finks, and the old armchair.

AN INQUIRY

IT was midday.  Voldyrev, a tall, thick-set country gentleman with a cropped head and prominent eyes, took off his overcoat, mopped his brow with his silk handkerchief, and somewhat diffidently went into the government office.  There they were scratching away. . . .