The room in which Oblómof was lying appeared at first glance to be handsomely furnished, There were a mahogany bureau, two sofas upholstered in silk, handsome screens embroidered with birds and fruits belonging to an imaginary nature. There were damask curtains, rugs, a number of paintings, bronzes, [Pg 6538] porcelains, and a quantity of beautiful bric-a-brac. But the experienced eye of a man of pure taste would have discovered at a single hasty glance that everything there betrayed merely the desire to keep up appearances in unimportant details, while really avoiding the burden. That had indeed been Oblómof's object when he furnished his room. Refined taste would not have been satisfied with those heavy ungraceful mahogany chairs, with those conventional étagères. The back of one sofa was dislocated; the veneering was broken off in places. The same characteristics were discoverable in the pictures and the vases, and all the ornaments. The proprietor himself, however, looked with such coolness and indifference on the decoration of his apartment that one might think he asked with his eyes, "Who brought you here and set you up?" As the result of such an indifferent manner of regarding his possessions, and perhaps of the still more indifferent attitude of Oblómof's servant Zakhár, the appearance of the room, if it were examined rather more critically, was amazing because of the neglect and carelessness which held sway there. On the walls, around the pictures, spiders' webs, loaded with dust, hung like festoons; the mirrors, instead of reflecting objects, would have served better as tablets for scribbling memoranda in the dust that covered them. The rugs were rags. On the sofa lay a forgotten towel; on the table you would generally find in the morning a plate or two with the remains of the evening meal, the salt-cellar, gnawed bones, and crusts of bread. Were it not for these plates, and the pipe half smoked out and flung down on the bed, or even the master himself stretched out on it, it might easily have been supposed that the room was uninhabited, it was so dusty, so lacking in all traces of human care. On the étagères, to be sure, lay two or three opened books or a crumpled newspaper; on the bureau stood an inkstand with pens; but the pages where the books were open were covered thick with dust and had turned yellow, evidently long ago thrown aside; the date of the newspaper was long past; and if any one had dipped a pen into the inkstand it would have started forth only a frightened, buzzing fly! Ílya Ílyitch was awake, contrary to his ordinary custom, very early,—at eight o'clock. Some anxiety was preying on his mind. Over his face passed alternately now apprehension, now annoyance, now vexation. It was evident that an internal conflict had [Pg 6539] him in its throes, and his intellect had not as yet come to his aid.