“Blockhead!” the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him.  “It’s wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces.  A stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect. . . .  What was I saying?  Oh, yes, about going into the Service, . . .  I should be ashamed to take the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid.  If one looks at it from a broader point of view, more seriously, I am eating what isn’t mine now.  Am I not?  But why am I not ashamed of that. . . .  It is a case of habit, I suppose . . . and not being able to realize one’s true position. . . .  But that position is most likely awful. . .”

I looked at him, wondering if the prince were showing off.  But his face was mild and his eyes were mournfully following the movements of the chestnut horse racing away, as though his happiness were racing away with it.

Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves, of life, of God. . . .

When I got out of the chaise at the gates of the house the prince said to me: 

“A man once said, wanting to annoy me, that I have the face of a cardsharper.  I have noticed that cardsharpers are usually dark.  Do you know, it seems that if I really had been born a cardsharper I should have remained a decent person to the day of my death, for I should never have had the boldness to do wrong.  I tell you frankly I have had the chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to myself and one woman . . . and one other person whom I know would have forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million.  But I could not.  I hadn’t the pluck!”

From the gates we had to go to the house through the copse by a long road, level as a ruler, and planted on each side with thick, lopped lilacs.  The house looked somewhat heavy, tasteless, like a facade on the stage.  It rose clumsily out of a mass of greenery, and caught the eye like a great stone thrown on the velvety turf.  At the chief entrance I was met by a fat old footman in a green swallow-tail coat and big silver-rimmed spectacles; without making any announcement, only looking contemptuously at my dusty figure, he showed me in.  As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber.  At the top I was enveloped in an atmosphere found only in museums, in signorial mansions and old-fashioned merchant houses; it seemed like the smell of something long past, which had once lived and died and had left its soul in the rooms.  I passed through three or four rooms on my way from the entry to the drawing-room.  I remember bright yellow, shining floors, lustres wrapped in stiff muslin, narrow, striped rugs which stretched not straight from door to door, as they usually do, but along the walls, so that not venturing to touch the bright floor with my muddy boots I had to describe a rectangle in each room.  In the drawing-room, where the footman left me, stood old-fashioned ancestral furniture in white covers, shrouded in twilight.  It looked surly and elderly, and, as though out of respect for its repose, not a sound was audible.