lent?

ANDREY. I was just thinking.... There is really nothing to say....

NATASHA. Yes... there was something I wanted to tell you.... Oh, yes.
Ferapont has come from the Council offices, he wants to see you.

ANDREY. [Yawns] Call him here.

[NATASHA goes out; ANDREY reads his book, stooping over the candle she
has left behind. FERAPONT enters; he wears a tattered old coat with the
collar up. His ears are muffled.]

ANDREY. Good morning, grandfather. What have you to say?

FERAPONT. The Chairman sends a book and some documents or other.
Here.... [Hands him a book and a packet.]

ANDREY. Thank you. It's all right. Why couldn't you come earlier? It's
past eight now.

FERAPONT. What?

ANDREY. [Louder]. I say you've come late, it's past eight.

FERAPONT. Yes, yes. I came when it was still light, but they wouldn't
let me in. They said you were busy. Well, what was I to do. If you're
busy, you're busy, and I'm in no hurry. [He thinks that ANDREY is asking
him something] What?

ANDREY. Nothing. [Looks through the book] To-morrow's Friday. I'm not
supposed to go to work, but I'll come--all the same... and do some
work. It's dull at home. [Pause] Oh, my dear old man, how strangely life
changes, and how it deceives! To-day, out of sheer boredom, I took up
this book--old university lectures, and I couldn't help laughing. My
God, I'm secretary of the local district council, the council which has
Protopopov for its chairman, yes, I'm the secretary, and the summit of
my ambitions is--to become a member of the council! I to be a member
of the local district council, I, who dream every night that I'm a
professor of Moscow University, a famous scholar of whom all Russia is
proud!

FERAPONT. I can't tell... I'm hard of hearing....

ANDREY. If you weren't, I don't suppose I should talk to you. I've got
to talk to somebody, and my wife doesn't understand me, and I'm a bit
afraid of my sisters--I don't know why unless it is that they may
make fun of me and make me feel ashamed... I don't drink, I don't like
public-houses, but how I should like to be sitting just now in Tyestov's
place in Moscow, or at the Great Moscow, old fellow!

FERAPONT. Moscow? That's where a contractor was once telling that some
merchants or other were eating pancakes; one ate forty pancakes and he
went and died, he was saying. Either forty or fifty, I forget which.

ANDREY. In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don't
know anybo