in as I ought.
I have not had time yet.'

Insarov spoke Russian perfectly correctly, pronouncing every word fully
and purely; but his guttural though pleasant voice sounded somehow not
Russian. Insarov's foreign extraction (he was a Bulgarian by birth)
was still more clearly marked in his appearance; he was a young man
of five-and-twenty, spare and sinewy, with a hollow chest and knotted
fingers; he had sharp features, a hooked nose, blue-black hair, a low
forehead, small, intent-looking, deep-set eyes, and bushy eyebrows; when
he smiled, splendid white teeth gleamed for an instant between his thin,
hard, over-defined lips. He was in a rather old but tidy coat, buttoned
up to the throat.

'Why did you leave your old lodging?' Bersenyev asked him.

'This is cheaper, and nearer to the university.'

'But now it's vacation.... And what could induce you to stay in the
town in summer! You should have taken a country cottage if you were
determined to move.'

Insarov made no reply to this remark, and offered Bersenyev a pipe,
adding: 'Excuse me, I have no cigarettes or cigars.'

Bersenyev began smoking the pipe.

'Here have I,' he went on, 'taken a little house near Kuntsovo, very
cheap and very roomy. In fact there is a room to spare upstairs.'

Insarov again made no answer.

Bersenyev drew at the pipe: 'I have even been thinking,' he began
again, blowing out the smoke in a thin cloud, 'that if any one could
be found--you, for instance, I thought of--who would care, who would
consent to establish himself there upstairs, how nice it would be! What
do you think, Dmitri Nikanorovitch?'

Insarov turned his little eyes on him. 'You propose my staying in your
country house?'

'Yes; I have a room to spare there upstairs.'

'Thanks very much, Andrei Petrovitch; but I expect my means would not
allow of it.'

'How do you mean?'

'My means would not allow of my living in a country house. It's
impossible for me to keep two lodgings.'

'But of course I'--Bersenyev was beginning, but he stopped short. 'You
would have no extra expense in that way,' he went on. 'Your lodging here
would remain for you, let us suppose; but then everything there is very
cheap; we could even arrange so as to dine, for instance, together.'

Insarov said nothing. Bersenyev began to feel awkward.

'You might at least pay me a visit sometime,' he began, after a short
pause. 'A few steps from me there's a family living with whom I want
very muc