they are in a man who is thoroughly well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road, that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . .  His sunburnt, thicknosed face and muscular neck seemed to say:  “I am well fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you young people too, will be wellfed, healthy, and satisfied with yourselves. . . .”  He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots.  From certain trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.

Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a young man of about three or four and twenty.  Only his fair hair and scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic provinces; everything else—­his name, Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion, his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely Russian.  Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian workman.  His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish, checked the accounts mechanically, and seemed all the while to be thinking of something else.  His movements and voice were calm, and smooth too, but his calmness was of a different kind from the engineer’s.  His sunburnt, slightly ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which looked up from under his brows, and his whole figure were expressive of spiritual stagnation —­mental sloth.  He looked as though it did not matter to him in the least whether the light were burning before him or not, whether the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was checking were correct or not. . . .  And on his intelligent, calm face I read:  “I don’t see so far any good in definite work, a secure living, and a settled outlook.  It’s all nonsense.  I was in Petersburg, now I am sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg, then in the spring here again. . . .  What sense there is in all that I don’t know, and no one knows. . . .  And so it’s no use talking about it. . . .”

He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an effusive and good-natured old attendant.  It seemed as though there were nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not himself been too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and cleverer.  Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist.  He had by now laid aside his good-humoured, jocose tone and spoke seriously, even with a fervour which was quite out of keeping with his expression of calmness.  Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was fond of them, indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them.  And this lack of practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not always grasp his meaning at once.