he was narrow-chested,
round-shouldered, and long-legged. He wore a silk cord for a tie,
had no trace of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine,
with the heels trodden down on one side. He stared, hardly even
blinking, with a strained expression, as though he were just going
to catch something, and he was always in a fuss.

"You wait a minute," he would say fussily. "You listen. . . .
Whatever was I talking about?"

We got into conversation. I learned that the estate on which I now
was had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and
had only the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov,
who considered it more profitable to put his money into land than
to keep it in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized
mortgaged estates in our neighbourhood. At the sale Tcheprakov's
mother had reserved for herself the right to live for the next two
years in one of the lodges at the side, and had obtained a post for
her son in the office.

"I should think he could buy!" Tcheprakov said of the engineer.
"See what he fleeces out of the contractors alone! He fleeces
everyone!"

Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with
him in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.

"She is a bit stingy," he said, "but she won't charge you much."

It was very cramped in the little rooms in which his mother lived;
they were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture
which had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the
furniture was all old-fashioned mahogany. Madame Tcheprakov, a very
stout middle-aged lady with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in
a big arm-chair by the window, knitting a stocking. She received
me ceremoniously.

"This is Poloznev, mamma," Tcheprakov introduced me. "He is going
to serve here."

"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice:
it seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.

"Yes," I answered.

"Sit down."

The dinner was a poor one. Nothing was served but pies filled with
bitter curd, and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept
blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other.
She talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her
whole figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse.
There was only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness
that she had been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that