ere shaking hands and chatting together--from every
side came expressions of friendship, laughter, jests, and badinage.
Everywhere I could feel the tie which bound this youthful society in
one, and everywhere, too, I could feel that it left me out. Yet this
impression lasted for a moment only, and was succeeded, together with
the vexation which it had caused, by the idea that it was best that
I should not belong to that society, but keep to my own circle of
gentlemen; wherefore I proceeded to seat myself upon the third bench,
with, as neighbours, Count B., Baron Z., the Prince R., Iwin, and
some other young men of the same class with none of whom, however, was
acquainted save with Iwin and Count B. Yet the look which these young
gentlemen threw at me at once made me feel that I was not of their set,
and I turned to observe what was going on around me. Semenoff, with
grey, matted hair, white teeth, and tunic flying open, was seated a
little distance off, and leaning forward on his elbows as he nibbled
a pen, while the gymnasium student who had come out first in the
examinations had established himself on the front bench, and, with a
black stock coming half-way up his cheek, was toying with the silver
watch-chain which adorned his satin waistcoat. On a bench in a raised
part of the hall I could descry Ikonin (evidently he had contrived to
enter the University somehow!), and hear him fussily proclaiming, in all
the glory of blue piped trousers which completely hid his boots, that he
was now seated on Parnassus. Ilinka--who had surprised me by giving me a
bow not only cold, but supercilious, as though to remind me that here we
were all equals--was just in front of me, with his legs resting in free
and easy style on another bench (a hit, somehow I thought, at myself),
and conversing with a student as he threw occasional glances in my
direction. Iwin's set by my side were talking in French, yet every word
which I overheard of their conversation seemed to me both stupid and
incorrect ("Ce n'est pas francais," I thought to myself), while all
the attitudes, utterances, and doings of Semenoff, Ilinka, and the rest
struck me as uniformly coarse, ungentlemanly, and "comme il ne faut
pas."

Thus, attached to no particular set, I felt isolated and unable to make
friends, and so grew resentful. One of the students on the bench in
front of me kept biting his nails, which were raw to the quick already,
and this so disgusted me that I ed