When he reached his own room, Rashevitch sat down on his bed and began to undress.  He felt oppressed, and he was still haunted by the same feeling as though he had eaten soap.  He was ashamed.  As he undressed he looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the district they called him the “toad,” and after every long conversation he always felt ashamed.  Somehow or other, by some fatality, it always happened that he began mildly, amicably, with good intentions, calling himself an old student, an idealist, a Quixote, but without being himself aware of it, gradually passed into abuse and slander, and what was most surprising, with perfect sincerity criticized science, art and morals, though he had not read a book for the last twenty years, had been nowhere farther than their provincial town, and did not really know what was going on in the world.  If he sat down to write anything, if it were only a letter of congratulation, there would somehow be abuse in the letter.  And all this was strange, because in reality he was a man of feeling, given to tears, Could he be possessed by some devil which hated and slandered in him, apart from his own will?

“It’s bad,” he sighed, as he lay down under the quilt.  “It’s bad.”

His daughters did not sleep either.  There was a sound of laughter and screaming, as though someone was being pursued; it was Genya in hysterics.  A little later Iraida was sobbing too.  A maidservant ran barefoot up and down the passage several times. . . .

“What a business!  Good Lord! . . .” muttered Rashevitch, sighing and tossing from side to side.  “It’s bad.”

He had a nightmare.  He dreamt he was standing naked, as tall as a giraffe, in the middle of the room, and saying, as he flicked his finger before him: 

“In his ugly face! his ugly face! his ugly face!”

He woke up in a fright, and first of all remembered that a misunderstanding had happened in the evening, and that Meier would certainly not come again.  He remembered, too, that he had to pay the interest at the bank, to find husbands for his daughters, that one must have food and drink, and close at hand were illness, old age, unpleasantnesses, that soon it would be winter, and that there was no wood. . . .

It was past nine o’clock in the morning.  Rashevitch slowly dressed, drank his tea and ate two hunks of bread and butter.  His daughters did not come down to breakfast; they did not want to meet him, and that wounded him.  He lay down on his sofa in his study, then sat down to his table and began writing a letter to his daughters.  His hand shook and his eyes smarted.  He wrote that he was old, and no use to anyone and that nobody loved him, and he begged his daughters to forget him, and when he died to bury him in a plain, deal coffin without ceremony, or to send his body to Harkov to the dissecting theatre.  He felt that every line he wrote reeked of malice and affectation, but he could not stop, and went on writing and writing.