The mistress regarded my stepfather with an air of injury, reproachfully advised him to try this or that medicine, but made fun of him behind his back. "A fine gentleman? The crumbs ought to be swept up more often in the dining-room, he says; crumbs cause the flies to multiply, he says." The young mistress said this, and the old mistress repeated after her: "What do you mean--a fine gentleman! With his coat all worn and shiny, and he always scraping it with a clothes-brush. He is so faddy; there must not be a speck of dust on it!" But the master spoke soothingly to them: "Be patient, wild fowl, he will soon be dead!" This senseless hostility of the middle class toward a man of good birth somehow drew me and my stepfather closer together. The crimson agaric is an unwholesome fungus, yet it is so beautiful. Suffocated among these people, my stepfather was like a fish which had accidentally fallen into a fowl-run--an absurd comparison, as everything in that life was absurd. I began to find in him resemblances to "Good Business"--a man whom I could never forget. I adorned him and my Queen with the best that I got out of books. I gave them all that was most pure in me, all the fantasies born of my reading. My stepfather was just such another man, aloof and unloved, as "Good Business." He behaved alike to every one in the house, never spoke first, and answered questions put to him with a peculiar politeness and brevity. I was delighted when he taught my masters. Standing at the table, bent double, he would tap the thick paper with his dry nails, and suggest calmly: "Here you will have to have a keystone. That will halve the force of the pressure; otherwise the pillar will crash through the walls." "That's true, the devil take it," muttered the master, and his wife said to him, when my stepfather had gone out: "It is simply amazing to me that you can allow any one to teach you your business like that!" For some reason she was always especially irritated when my stepfather cleaned his teeth and gargled after supper, protruding his harshly outlined Adam's apple. "In my opinion," she would say in a sour voice, "it is injurious to you to bend your head back like that, Evgen Vassilvich!" Smiling politely he asked: "Why?' "Because--I am sure it is." He began to clean his bluish nails with a tiny bone stick. "He is cleaning his nails again; well, I never!" exclaimed the mistress. "He is dying--and there he is." "Ekh!" sighed the master. "What a lot of stupidity has flourished in you, wild fowl!" "Why do you say that?" asked his wife, confused. But the old mistress complained passionately to God at night: