Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was
a young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair
and scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity
in his features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the
Baltic provinces; everything else--his name, Mihail Mihailovitch,
his religion, his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his
face were purely Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and
high boots, with his round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his
sunburnt face, he did not look like a student or a Baron, but like
an ordinary Russian workman. His words and gestures were few, he
drank reluctantly without relish, checked the accounts mechanically,
and seemed all the while to be thinking of something else. His
movements and voice were calm, and smooth too, but his calmness was
of a different kind from the engineer's. His sunburnt, slightly
ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which looked up from under his
brows, and his whole figure were expressive of spiritual stagnation
--mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter to him in
the least whether the light were burning before him or not, whether
the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was checking
were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I read:
"I don't see so far any good in definite work, a secure living, and
a settled outlook. It's all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I
am sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to
Petersburg, then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there
is in all that I don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's
no use talking about it. . . ."

He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending
indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an
effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there