Olga Mihalovna was accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished
in grandeur, and in the presidential chair there sat not Pyotr
Dmitritch, but another man whom every one called Mr. President.
This consciousness of power prevented him from sitting still in his
place, and he seized every opportunity to ring his bell, to glance
sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where had he got his short-sight
and his deafness when he suddenly began to see and hear with
difficulty, and, frowning majestically, insisted on people speaking
louder and coming closer to the table? From the height of his
grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or sounds, so that it
seemed that if Olga Mihalovna herself had gone up to him he would
have shouted even to her, "Your name?" Peasant witnesses he addressed
familiarly, he shouted at the public so that his voice could be
heard even in the street, and behaved incredibly with the lawyers.
If a lawyer had to speak to him, Pyotr Dmitritch, turning a little
away from him, looked with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning
to signify thereby that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that
he was neither recognizing him nor listening to him; if a badly-dressed
lawyer spoke, Pyotr Dmitritch pricked up his ears and looked the
man up and down with a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to
say: "Queer sort of lawyers nowadays!"

"What do you mean by that?" he would interrupt.

If a would-be eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word, saying,
for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmitritch
brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does
that mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words
you do not understand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would
walk away from the table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitritch;