Woloda was lying reading a French novel on the sofa when I paid my usual visit to his room after my evening lessons.  He looked up at me for a moment from his book, and then went on reading.  This perfectly simple and natural movement, however, offended me.  I conceived that the glance implied a question why I had come and a wish to hide his thoughts from me (I may say that at that period a tendency to attach a meaning to the most insignificant of acts formed a prominent feature in my character).  So I went to the table and also took up a book to read.  Yet, even before I had actually begun reading, the idea struck me how ridiculous it was that, although we had never seen one another all day, we should have not a word to exchange.

“Are you going to stay in to-night, Woloda?”

“I don’t know.  Why?”

“Oh, because—­” Seeing that the conversation did not promise to be a success, I took up my book again, and began to read.  Yet it was a strange thing that, though we sometimes passed whole hours together without speaking when we were alone, the mere presence of a third—­sometimes of a taciturn and wholly uninteresting person—­sufficed to plunge us into the most varied and engrossing of discussions.  The truth was that we knew one another too well, and to know a person either too well or too little acts as a bar to intimacy.

“Is Woloda at home?” came in Dubkoff’s voice from the ante-room.

“Yes!” shouted Woloda, springing up and throwing aside his book.

Dubkoff and Nechludoff entered.

“Are you coming to the theatre, Woloda?”

“No, I have no time,” he replied with a blush.

“Oh, never mind that.  Come along.”

“But I haven’t got a ticket.”

“Tickets, as many as you like, at the entrance.”

“Very well, then; I’ll be back in a minute,” said Woloda evasively as he left the room.  I knew very well that he wanted to go, but that he had declined because he had no money, and had now gone to borrow five roubles of one of the servants—­to be repaid when he got his next allowance.

“How do you do, diplomat?” said Dubkoff to me as he shook me by the hand.  Woloda’s friends had called me by that nickname since the day when Grandmamma had said at luncheon that Woloda must go into the army, but that she would like to see me in the diplomatic service, dressed in a black frock-coat, and with my hair arranged a la coq (the two essential requirements, in her opinion, of a diplomat).

“Where has Woloda gone to?” asked Nechludoff.

“I don’t know,” I replied, blushing to think that nevertheless they had probably guessed his errand.

“I suppose he has no money?  Yes, I can see I am right, O diplomatist,” he added, taking my smile as an answer in the affirmative.  “Well, I have none, either.  Have you any, Dubkoff?”

“I’ll see,” replied Dubkoff, feeling for his pocket, and rummaging gingerly about with his squat little fingers among his small change.  “Yes, here are five copecks-twenty, but that’s all,” he concluded with a comic gesture of his hand.