Very probably the high estimate of the deceased's virtues was largely based on a comparison between him and his brother. People did not like Yudushka. Not that they couldn't get the better of him, but that he was entirely too much of a nuisance with his scrape-penny ways. Very few could bring themselves to lease land from him. They were afraid of his passion for litigation. He dragged any number of people to court, wasted their time, and won nothing, because his pettifogging habits were so well known in the district that almost without listening to the case the courts dismissed his claims. Since meanness, or, to be more exact, a kind of moral hardness, especially when under the mask of hypocrisy, always inspires a sort of superstitious fear, Yudushka's neighbors bowed waist low as they passed by the Bloodsucker, standing all in black beside the coffin with palms crossed and eyes raised upward. As long as the deceased lay in the house, the family walked about on tip-toe, stole glances into the dining-room, where the coffin stood on the table, wagged their heads, and talked in whispers. Yudushka pretended to be overcome by the disaster, and shuffled painfully along the corridor, paid a visit to the "dear deceased," affected deep emotional stress, arranged the pall on the coffin, and whispered to the commissioner of police, who was taking the inventory and affixing the seal. Petenka and Volodenka busied themselves about the coffin, placing and lighting the candles, handing over the censer, and so forth. Anninka and Lubinka cried and through their tears helped the chanters sing the mass for the dead in thin little voices. The woman servants, dressed in black calico, wiped their noses red from weeping on their aprons.