"And tea and sugar?" the boy asked with Moscow sharpness.
And a minute later he rushed in with a boiling samovar in his hands held out level with his shoulders; on the round table in front of the sofa he quickly put a tray with a glass and a battered brass slop-basin, and thumped the samovar down on the tray. . . . Kasimir Stanislavovitch, while the tea was drawing, mechanically opened the Moscow Daily which the page-boy had brought in with the samovar. His eye fell on a report that yesterday an unknown man had been picked up unconscious . . . "The victim was taken to the hospital," he read, and threw the paper away. He felt very low and unsteady. He got up and opened the window—it faced the yard—and a breath of freshness and of the city came to him; there came to him the melodious shouts of hawkers, the bells of horse-trams humming behind the house opposite, the blended rap-tap of the cars, the musical drone of church-bells. . . . The city had long since started its huge, noisy life in that bright, jolly, almost spring day. Kasimir Stanislavovitch squeezed the lemon into a glass of tea and greedily drank the sour, muddy liquid; then he went again behind the screen. The Versailles was quiet. It was pleasant and peaceful; his eye wandered leisurely over the hotel notice on the wall: "A stay of three hours is counted as a full day." A mouse scuttled in the chest of drawers, rolling about a piece of sugar left there by some visitor. . . . Thus half-asleep Kasimir Stanislavovitch lay for a long time behind the screen, until the sun had gone from the room and another freshness was wafted in from the window, the freshness of evening.
Then he carefully got himself in order: he undid his bag, changed his underclothing, took out a cheap, but clean handkerchief, brushed his shiny frock-coat, top-hat, and overcoat, took out of its torn pocket a crumpled Kiev newspaper of January 15th and threw it away into the corner. . . . Having dressed and combed his whiskers with a dyeing comb, he counted his money—there remained in his purse four roubles, seventy copecks—and went out. Exactly at six o'clock he was outside a low, ancient little church in the Molchanovka. Behind the church fence a spreading tree was just breaking into green; children were playing there—the black stocking of one thin little girl, jumping over a rope, was continually coming down—and he sat there on a bench among perambulators with sleeping babies and nurses in Russian costumes. Spar-
