tly purred and hugged
himself with satisfaction at being at home again at last, and able
to have his beloved shower bath.

"There is no disputing," he said to me at supper, "there is no
disputing; you are all nice and charming people, but for some reason,
as soon as you take to manual labour, or go in for saving the
peasants, in the long run it all comes to no more than being a
dissenter. Aren't you a dissenter? Here you don't take vodka. What's
the meaning of that if it is not being a dissenter?"

To satisfy him I drank some vodka and I drank some wine, too. We
tasted the cheese, the sausage, the pates, the pickles, and the
savouries of all sorts that the engineer had brought with him, and
the wine that had come in his absence from abroad. The wine was
first-rate. For some reason the engineer got wine and cigars from
abroad without paying duty; the caviare and the dried sturgeon
someone sent him for nothing; he did not pay rent for his flat as
the owner of the house provided the kerosene for the line; and
altogether he and his daughter produced on me the impression that
all the best in the world was at their service, and provided for
them for nothing.

I went on going to see them, but not with the same eagerness. The
engineer made me feel constrained, and in his presence I did not
feel free. I could not face his clear, guileless eyes, his reflections
wearied and sickened me; I was sickened, too, by the memory that
so lately I had been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed
man, and that he had been brutally rude to me. It is true that he
put his arm round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly
way, approved my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he
despised my insignificance, and only put up with me to please his
daughter, and I couldn't now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved
unsociably and kept expecting that in another minute he would address
me as Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my pride as a
provincial and a working man was revolted. I, a proletarian, a house
painter, went every day to rich people who were alien to me, and
whom the whole town regarded as though they were foreigners, and
every day I drank costly wines with them and ate unusual dainties
--my conscience refused to be reconciled to it! On my way to the
house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them from
under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was
going home from the eng