"I should thank you, but I know that you consider thanks a convention."

He was pleased as a child with the pointed toes and the laces, and
even changed his plans.

"Now I shall go to Novotcherkassk in a week, and not in a fortnight,"
he said, thinking aloud. "In shoes like these I shall not be ashamed
to show myself to my godfather. I was not going away from here just
because I hadn't any decent clothes. . . ."

When the coachman was carrying out my trunk, a lay brother with a
good ironical face came in to sweep out the room. Alexandr Ivanitch
seemed flustered and embarrassed and asked him timidly:

"Am I to stay here or go somewhere else?"

He could not make up his mind to occupy a whole room to himself,
and evidently by now was feeling ashamed of living at the expense
of the Monastery. He was very reluctant to part from me; to put off
being lonely as long as possible, he asked leave to see me on my
way.

The road from the Monastery, which had been excavated at the cost
of no little labour in the chalk mountain, moved upwards, going
almost like a spiral round the mountain, over roots and under sullen
overhanging pines. . . .

The Donets was the first to vanish from our sight, after it the
Monastery yard with its thousands of people, and then the green