“Here he is, here he is!  Very glad to see you, Mr. House-painter!  Masha has told me all about it; she has been singing your praises.  I quite understand and approve,” he went on, taking my arm.  “To be a good workman is ever so much more honest and more sensible than wasting government paper and wearing a cockade on your head.  I myself worked in Belgium with these very hands and then spent two years as a mechanic. . . .”

He was wearing a short reefer jacket and indoor slippers; he walked like a man with the gout, rolling slightly from side to side and rubbing his hands.  Humming something he softly purred and hugged himself with satisfaction at being at home again at last, and able to have his beloved shower bath.

“There is no disputing,” he said to me at supper, “there is no disputing; you are all nice and charming people, but for some reason, as soon as you take to manual labour, or go in for saving the peasants, in the long run it all comes to no more than being a dissenter.  Aren’t you a dissenter?  Here you don’t take vodka.  What’s the meaning of that if it is not being a dissenter?”

To satisfy him I drank some vodka and I drank some wine, too.  We tasted the cheese, the sausage, the pates, the pickles, and the savouries of all sorts that the engineer had brought with him, and the wine that had come in his absence from abroad.  The wine was first-rate.  For some reason the engineer got wine and cigars from abroad without paying duty; the caviare and the dried sturgeon someone sent him for nothing; he did not pay rent for his flat as the owner of the house provided the kerosene for the line; and altogether he and his daughter produced on me the impression that all the best in the world was at their service, and provided for them for nothing.

I went on going to see them, but not with the same eagerness.  The engineer made me feel constrained, and in his presence I did not feel free.  I could not face his clear, guileless eyes, his reflections wearied and sickened me; I was sickened, too, by the memory that so lately I had been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed man, and that he had been brutally rude to me.  It is true that he put his arm round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way, approved my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he despised my insignificance, and only put up with me to please his daughter, and I couldn’t now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved unsociably and kept expecting that in another minute he would address me as Panteley as he did his footman Pavel.  How my pride as a provincial and a working man was revolted.  I, a proletarian, a house painter, went every day to rich people who were alien to me, and whom the whole town regarded as though they were foreigners, and every day I drank costly wines with them and ate unusual dainties —­my conscience refused to be reconciled to it!  On my way to the house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them from under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was going home from the engineer’s I was ashamed of my well-fed condition.