And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years old, clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a good man and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic family, a prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable _rôle_ in the history of our literature and education. He himself is clever, gifted, and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities. To a certain extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his eccentricities have an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for his friends. Among the latter I know not a few who cannot see his many merits clearly because of his eccentricities. As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety bass: “How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It’s hellishly cold.” Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare’s grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously. His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his tender, easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and provocativeness don’t tire one’s ears, and one very soon gets used to it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the table. “O Lord,” he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows, “there are some funny people in the world.” “Who?” asks Katy. “I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot N---- on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse jowl of his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife, and his students, who won’t come to his lectures. ‘Well,’ I think to myself, ‘he’s seen me. It’s all up--no hope for me...’” And so on in the same strain. Or he begins like this, “Yesterday I was at Z’s public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do wonder how our _alma mater_ dares to show the public such an ass, such a double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he’s a European fool. Good Lord, you won’t find one like him in all Europe--not even if you looked in daytime, and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were sucking a stick of barley-sugar--su--su--su. He gets a fright because he can’t make out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just keep moving, hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all you can’t make out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it’s so terrific. It can only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at the Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with it!” Immediately an abrupt change of subject.