It was disagreeable to remember the fish he had eaten at dinner.  The moonlight worried him, and then he heard talking.  In an adjoining room, probably in the parlour, Father Sisoy was talking politics: 

“There’s war among the Japanese now.  They are fighting.  The Japanese, my good soul, are the same as the Montenegrins; they are the same race.  They were under the Turkish yoke together.”

And then he heard the voice of Marya Timofyevna: 

“So, having said our prayers and drunk tea, we went, you know, to Father Yegor at Novokatnoye, so. . .”

And she kept on saying, “having had tea” or “having drunk tea,” and it seemed as though the only thing she had done in her life was to drink tea.

The bishop slowly, languidly, recalled the seminary, the academy.  For three years he had been Greek teacher in the seminary:  by that time he could not read without spectacles.  Then he had become a monk; he had been made a school inspector.  Then he had defended his thesis for his degree.  When he was thirty-two he had been made rector of the seminary, and consecrated archimandrite:  and then his life had been so easy, so pleasant; it seemed so long, so long, no end was in sight.  Then he had begun to be ill, had grown very thin and almost blind, and by the advice of the doctors had to give up everything and go abroad.

“And what then?” asked Sisoy in the next room.

“Then we drank tea . . .” answered Marya Timofyevna.

“Good gracious, you’ve got a green beard,” said Katya suddenly in surprise, and she laughed.

The bishop remembered that the grey-headed Father Sisoy’s beard really had a shade of green in it, and he laughed.

“God have mercy upon us, what we have to put up with with this girl!” said Sisoy, aloud, getting angry.  “Spoilt child!  Sit quiet!”

The bishop remembered the perfectly new white church in which he had conducted the services while living abroad, he remembered the sound of the warm sea.  In his flat he had five lofty light rooms; in his study he had a new writing-table, lots of books.  He had read a great deal and often written.  And he remembered how he had pined for his native land, how a blind beggar woman had played the guitar under his window every day and sung of love, and how, as he listened, he had always for some reason thought of the past.  But eight years had passed and he had been called back to Russia, and now he was a suffragan bishop, and all the past had retreated far away into the mist as though it were a dream. . . .

Father Sisoy came into the bedroom with a candle.

“I say!” he said, wondering, “are you asleep already, your holiness?”

“What is it?”

“Why, it’s still early, ten o’clock or less.  I bought a candle to-day; I wanted to rub you with tallow.”

“I am in a fever . . .” said the bishop, and he sat up.  “I really ought to have something.  My head is bad. . . .”