every day I drank costly wines with them and ate unusual dainties
--my conscience refused to be reconciled to it! On my way to the
house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them from
under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was
going home from the engineer's I was ashamed of my well-fed condition.

Above all I was afraid of being carried away. Whether I was walking
along the street, or working, or talking to the other fellows, I
was all the time thinking of one thing only, of going in the evening
to see Mariya Viktorovna and was picturing her voice, her laugh,
her movements. When I was getting ready to go to her I always spent
a long time before my nurse's warped looking-glass, as I fastened
my tie; my serge trousers were detestable in my eyes, and I suffered
torments, and at the same time despised myself for being so trivial.
When she called to me out of the other room that she was not dressed
and asked me to wait, I listened to her dressing; it agitated me,
I felt as though the ground were giving way under my feet. And when
I saw a woman's figure in the street, even at a distance, I invariably
compared it. It seemed to me that all our girls and women were
vulgar, that they were absurdly dressed, and did not know how to
hold themselves; and these comparisons aroused a feeling of pride
in me: Mariya Viktorovna was the best of them all! And I dreamed
of her and myself at night.

One evening at supper with the engineer we ate a whole lobster As
I was going home afterwards I remembered that the engineer twice
called me "My dear fellow" at supper, and I reflected that they
treated me very kindly in that house, as they might an unfortunate
big dog who had been kicked out by its owners, that they were amusing
themselves with me, and that when they were tired of me they would