“Two and a half,” said his father, shaking his head.

“Well, it’s not like the country there, you go into a restaurant to have a snack of something, you ask for one thing and another, others join till there is a party of us, one has a drink⁠—and before you know where you are it is daylight and you’ve three or four roubles each to pay. And when one is with Samorodov he likes to have coffee with brandy in it after everything, and brandy is sixty kopecks for a little glass.”

“And he is making it all up,” said the old man enthusiastically; “he is making it all up, lying!”

“I am always with Samorodov now. It is Samorodov who writes my letters to you. He writes splendidly. And if I were to tell you, mamma,” Anisim went on gaily, addressing Varvara, “the sort of fellow that Samorodov is, you would not believe me. We call him Muhtar, because he is black like an Armenian. I can see through him, I know all his affairs like the five fingers of my hand, and he feels that, and he always follows me about, we are regular inseparables. He seems not to like it in a way, but he can’t get on without me. Where I go he goes. I have a correct, trustworthy eye, mamma. One sees a peasant selling a shirt in the market place. ‘Stay, that shirt’s stolen.’ And really it turns out it is so: the shirt was a stolen one.”

“What do you tell from?” asked Varvara.