He did not shake hands, but kneaded one’s hands in his. And he was always apologising. If he asked for anything it was “Excuse me”; if he gave you anything it was “Excuse me” too.

He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired two houses in Moscow as part of his wife’s dowry. He began doing them up and building a bathhouse, and was completely ruined. Now his wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had to support them⁠—and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife was by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited, sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for someone to borrow from⁠—and this, too, amused him. He had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from family life.