My room was small and poky, with neither table nor chairs in it, but quite filled up with a chest of drawers by the window, the stove and two little wooden sofas which stood against the walls, facing one another, leaving a narrow space to walk between them.  Thin rusty-looking little mattresses lay on the little sofas, as well as my belongings.  There were two sofas, so this room was evidently intended for two, and I pointed out the fact to my companion.

“They will soon be ringing for mass, though,” he said, “and I shan’t have to be in your way very long.”

Still under the impression that he was in my way and feeling awkward, he moved with a guilty step to his little sofa, sighed guiltily and sat down.  When the tallow candle with its dim, dilatory flame had left off flickering and burned up sufficiently to make us both visible, I could make out what he was like.  He was a young man of two-and-twenty, with a round and pleasing face, dark childlike eyes, dressed like a townsman in grey cheap clothes, and as one could judge from his complexion and narrow shoulders, not used to manual labour.  He was of a very indefinite type; one could take him neither for a student nor for a man in trade, still less for a workman.  But looking at his attractive face and childlike friendly eyes, I was unwilling to believe he was one of those vagabond impostors with whom every conventual establishment where they give food and lodging is flooded, and who give themselves out as divinity students, expelled for standing up for justice, or for church singers who have lost their voice. . . .  There was something characteristic, typical, very familiar in his face, but what exactly, I could not remember nor make out.

For a long time he sat silent, pondering.  Probably because I had not shown appreciation of his remarks about bones and the mortuary, he thought that I was ill-humoured and displeased at his presence.  Pulling a sausage out of his pocket, he turned it about before his eyes and said irresolutely: 

“Excuse my troubling you, . . . have you a knife?”

I gave him a knife.

“The sausage is disgusting,” he said, frowning and cutting himself off a little bit.  “In the shop here they sell you rubbish and fleece you horribly. . . .  I would offer you a piece, but you would scarcely care to consume it.  Will you have some?”

In his language, too, there was something typical that had a very great deal in common with what was characteristic in his face, but what it was exactly I still could not decide.  To inspire confidence and to show that I was not ill-humoured, I took some of the proffered sausage.  It certainly was horrible; one needed the teeth of a good house-dog to deal with it.  As we worked our jaws we got into conversation; we began complaining to each other of the lengthiness of the service.

“The rule here approaches that of Mount Athos,” I said; “but at Athos the night services last ten hours, and on great feast-days —­fourteen!  You should go there for prayers!”