“But I told you that yesterday.  It is three years since I left school. . . .  I left in the fourth class.”

“And why did you give up high school?” asks the man of learning, looking at Ivan Matveyitch’s writing.

“Oh, through family circumstances.”

“Must I speak to you again, Ivan Matveyitch?  When will you get over your habit of dragging out the lines?  There ought not to be less than forty letters in a line.”

“What, do you suppose I do it on purpose?” says Ivan Matveyitch, offended.  “There are more than forty letters in some of the other lines. . . .  You count them.  And if you think I don’t put enough in the line, you can take something off my pay.”

“Oh dear, that’s not the point.  You have no delicacy, really. . . .  At the least thing you drag in money.  The great thing is to be exact, Ivan Matveyitch, to be exact is the great thing.  You ought to train yourself to be exact.”

The maidservant brings in a tray with two glasses of tea on it, and a basket of rusks. . . .  Ivan Matveyitch takes his glass awkwardly with both hands, and at once begins drinking it.  The tea is too hot.  To avoid burning his mouth Ivan Matveyitch tries to take a tiny sip.  He eats one rusk, then a second, then a third, and, looking sideways, with embarrassment, at the man of learning, timidly stretches after a fourth. . . .  The noise he makes in swallowing, the relish with which he smacks his lips, and the expression of hungry greed in his raised eyebrows irritate the man of learning.

“Make haste and finish, time is precious.”

“You dictate, I can drink and write at the same time. . . .  I must confess I was hungry.”

“I should think so after your walk!”

“Yes, and what wretched weather!  In our parts there is a scent of spring by now. . . .  There are puddles everywhere; the snow is melting.”

“You are a southerner, I suppose?”

“From the Don region. . . .  It’s quite spring with us by March.  Here it is frosty, everyone’s in a fur coat, . . . but there you can see the grass . . . it’s dry everywhere, and one can even catch tarantulas.”

“And what do you catch tarantulas for?”

“Oh! . . . to pass the time . . .” says Ivan Matveyitch, and he sighs.  “It’s fun catching them.  You fix a bit of pitch on a thread, let it down into their hole and begin hitting the tarantula on the back with the pitch, and the brute gets cross, catches hold of the pitch with his claws, and gets stuck. . . .  And what we used to do with them!  We used to put a basinful of them together and drop a bihorka in with them.”

“What is a bihorka?”

“That’s another spider, very much the same as a tarantula.  In a fight one of them can kill a hundred tarantulas.”

“H’m! . . .  But we must write, . . .  Where did we stop?”

The man of learning dictates another twenty lines, then sits plunged in meditation.