and when I refused to do so, a gentleman of benevolent appearance
in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club
committee, said to me:

"If you say much more, you blackguard, I'll pound your face into a
jelly!"

And when the flunkey whispered to him what I was, the son of Poloznev
the architect, he became embarrassed, turned crimson, but immediately
recovered himself and said: "Devil take him."

In the shops they palmed off on us workmen putrid meat, musty flour,
and tea that had been used and dried again; the police hustled us
in church, the assistants and nurses in the hospital plundered us,
and if we were too poor to give them a bribe they revenged themselves
by bringing us food in dirty vessels. In the post-office the pettiest
official considered he had a right to treat us like animals, and
to shout with coarse insolence: "You wait!" "Where are you shoving
to?" Even the housedogs were unfriendly to us, and fell upon us
with peculiar viciousness. But the thing that struck me most of all
in my new position was the complete lack of justice, what is defined
by the peasants in the words: "They have forgotten God." Rarely did
a day pass without swindling. We were swindled by the merchants who
sold us oil, by the contractors and the workmen and the people who
employed us. I need not say that there could never be a question
of our rights, and we always had to ask for the money we earned as
though it were a charity, and to stand waiting for it at the back
door, cap in hand.

I was papering a room at the club next to the reading-room; in the