mpled-up handkerchief and pulling
down his grey reefer jacket, Ivan Matveyitch goes through the hall
and the drawing-room to the study. There a place and paper and even
cigarettes had been put ready for him long ago.

"Sit down, sit down," the man of learning urges him on, rubbing his
hands impatiently. "You are an unsufferable person. . . . You know
the work has to be finished by a certain time, and then you are so
late. One is forced to scold you. Come, write, . . . Where did we
stop?"

Ivan Matveyitch smooths his bristling cropped hair and takes up his
pen. The man of learning walks up and down the room, concentrates
himself, and begins to dictate:

"The fact is . . . comma . . . that so to speak fundamental forms
. . . have you written it? . . . forms are conditioned entirely by
the essential nature of those principles . . . comma . . . which
find in them their expression and can only be embodied in them
. . . . New line, . . . There's a stop there, of course. . . . More
independence is found . . . is found . . . by the forms which have
not so much a political . . . comma . . . as a social character . ."

"The high-school boys have a different uniform now . . . a grey
one," said Ivan Matveyitch, "when I was at school it was better:
they used to wear regular uniforms."

"Oh dear, write please!" says the man of learning wrathfully.
"Character . . . have you written it? Speaking of the forms relating
to the organization . . . of administrative functions, and not to
the regulation of the life of the people . . . comma . . . it cannot
be said that they are marked by the nationalism of their forms . . .
the last three words in inverted commas. . . . Aie, aie . . .
tut, tut . . . so what did you want to say about the high school?"

"That they used to wear a different uniform in my time."

"Aha! . . . indeed, . . . Is it long since you left the high school?"

"But I told you that yesterday. It is three years since I left
school. . . . I left in the fourth class."

"And why did you give up high school?" asks the man of learning,
looking at Ivan Matveyitch's writing.

"Oh, through family circumstances."

"Must I speak to you again, Ivan Matveyitch? When will you get over
your habit of dragging out the lines? There ought not to be less
than forty letters in a line."

"What, do you suppose I do it on purpose?" says Ivan Matveyitch,
offended. "There are more than forty letters in some of the other
lines. . . . Yo