"And I learn from them. What am I? I know
nothing. What was I taught? While there they speak of everything--and
each one has his word to say. Do not hinder me from being like a man."

"Pooh! How you've learned to speak! With so much anger, like the hail
striking against the roof! Very well, be like a man, but in order to be
like a man it might be less dangerous for you to go to the tavern; the
people there are after all better than Sophya's people. And you, young
man, you should have learned to discriminate one person from another.
Take Sophya, for instance: What does she represent? An insect for the
adornment of nature and nothing more!"

Intensely agitated, Foma set his teeth together and walked away from
Mayakin, thrusting his hands still deeper into his pockets. But the old
man soon started again a conversation about Medinskaya.

They were on their way back from the bay after an inspection of
the steamers, and seated in a big and commodious sledge, they were
enthusiastically discussing business matters in a friendly way. It was
in March. The water under the sledge-runners was bubbling, the snow was
already covered with a rather dirty fleece, and the sun shone warmly and
merrily in the clear sky.

"Will you go to your lady as soon as we arrive?" asked Mayakin,
unexpectedly, interrupting their business talk.

"I will," said Foma, shortly, and with displeasure.

"Mm. Tell me, how often do you give her presents?" asked Mayakin,
plainly and somewhat intimately.

"What presents? What for?" Foma wondered.

"You make her no presents? You don't say. Does she live with you then
merely so, for love's sake?"

Foma boiled up with anger and shame, turned abruptly toward the old man
and said reproachfully:

"Eh! You are an old man, and yet you speak so that it is a shame to
listen to you! To say such a thing! Do you think she would come down to
this?"

Mayakin smacked his lips and sang out in a mournful voice:

"What a blockhead you are! What a fool!" and suddenly grown angry, he
spat out: "Shame upon you! All sorts of brutes drank out of the pot,
nothing but the dregs remained, and now a fool has made a god unto
himself of this dirty pot. Devil! You just go up to her and tell her
plainly: 'I want to be your lover. I am a young man, don't charge me
much for it.'"

"Godfather!" said Foma, sternly, in a threatening voice, "I cannot bear
to hear such words. If it were someone else."

"But who except myself would ca