"Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death
are languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent
Caucasus strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the
choice of a chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus,
I should choose the job of chimney-sweep."

Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes
fixed dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken
temples, at his bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off
his heel, displaying a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to
pity, and probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child,
he asked:

"Is your mother living?"

"Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this
affair."

Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a
good-natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him,
with whom one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve.
What he understood in him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a
great deal and at unsuitable times; he played cards, despised his
work, lived beyond his means, frequently made use of unseemly
expressions in conversation, walked about the streets in his slippers,
and quarrelled with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna before other people--and
Samoylenko did not like this. But the fact that Laevsky had once
been a student in the Faculty of Arts, subscribed to two fat reviews,
often talked so cleverly that only a few people understood him, was