And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail Fyodorovitch, a tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows, walks in. He is a good-natured man and an excellent comrade. He comes of a fortunate and talented old noble family which has played a prominent part in the history of literature and enlightenment. He is himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but has his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all queer fish, but in his oddities there is something exceptional, apt to cause anxiety among his acquaintances. I know a good many people for whom his oddities completely obscure his good qualities. Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in his velvety bass: “Good-evening. Are you having tea? That’s just right. It’s diabolically cold.” Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery as in Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He is always talking about serious things, but he never speaks seriously. His judgments are always harsh and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness and abuse do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them. Every evening he brings with him five or six anecdotes from the University, and he usually begins with them when he sits down to table. “Oh, Lord!” he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically. “What comic people there are in the world!” “Well?” asks Katya. “As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that old idiot N. N---- on the stairs.... He was going along as usual, sticking out his chin like a horse, looking for some one to listen to his grumblings at his migraine, at his wife, and his students who won’t attend his lectures. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘he has seen me--I am done for now; it is all up....’” And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this: “I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z----‘s public lecture. I wonder how it is our alma mater--don’t speak of it after dark--dare display in public such noodles and patent dullards as that Z. Z---- Why, he is a European fool! Upon my word, you could not find another like him all over Europe! He lectures--can you imagine?--as though he were sucking a sugar-stick--sue, sue, sue;... he is in a nervous funk; he can hardly decipher his own manuscript; his poor little thoughts crawl along like a bishop on a bicycle, and, what’s worse, you can never make out what he is trying to say. The deadly dulness is awful, the very flies expire. It can only be compared with the boredom in the assembly-hall at the yearly meeting when the traditional address is read--damn it!” And at once an abrupt transition: