ects should be discussed before such serious people as
him and me.

In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough to sicken me
as though I had been seeing and hearing him for an eternity. I hate the
poor fellow. His soft, smooth voice and bookish language exhaust me, and
his stories stupefy me.... He cherishes the best of feelings for me,
and talks to me simply in order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by
looking at him as though I wanted to hypnotize him, and think, "Go, go,
go!..." But he is not amenable to thought-suggestion, and sits on and on
and on....

While he is with me I can never shake off the thought, "It's possible
when I die he will be appointed to succeed me," and my poor lecture-hall
presents itself to me as an oasis in which the spring is died up; and I
am ungracious, silent, and surly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, as though he
were to blame for such thoughts, and not I myself. When he begins, as
usual, praising up the German savants, instead of making fun of him
good-humouredly, as I used to do, I mutter sullenly:

"Asses, your Germans!..."

That is like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who once, when he was
bathing with Pirogov at Revel and vexed at the water's being very cold,
burst out with, "Scoundrels, these Germans!" I behave badly with Pyotr
Ignatyevitch, and only when he is going away, and from the window I
catch a glimpse of his grey hat behind the garden-fence, I want to call
out and say, "Forgive me, my dear fellow!"

Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom now I hate and
despise, dines with us almost every day. I used to endure his presence
in silence, now I aim biting remarks at him which make my wife and
daughter blush. Carried away by evil feeling, I often say things that
are simply stupid, and I don't know why I say them. So on one occasion
it happened that I stared a long time at Gnekker, and, _a propos_ of
nothing, I fired off:

"An eagle may perchance swoop down below a cock,
But never will the fowl soar upwards to the clouds..."

And the most vexatious thing is that the fowl Gnekker shows himself much
cleverer than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are
on his side, he takes up the line of meeting my gibes with condescending
silence, as though to say:

"The old chap is in his dotage; what's the use of talking to him?"

Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful how petty a man
may become! I am capable