Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/61

 "Are you staying at Demianoff's, Matvei Petrovitch?"

"Yes, Demianoff's," was the reply, also given with a start.

"Next time I will stay there too. Tipiakoff's is absolutely unendurable. Noise and uproar all night! Tapping, coughing, crying children. It's unbearable!"

The assistant procurator, a stout, sated brunet, with gold spectacles and a neatly trimmed beard, sat motionless as a statue, and, resting his face on his hand, read Byron's Cain. His eyes expressed greedy absorption, and his brows rose higher and higher. Sometimes he lay back in his chair and looked indifferently ahead, but soon again became absorbed in his book. The defending advocate drew a blunt pencil along the table, and, his head inclined aside, thought. His young face expressed only concentrated, cold tedium, such tedium as shows on the faces of schoolboys and clerks who sit day after day in the same places and see the same people and the same walls. The speech he was to make in no way troubled him. And, indeed, what was it? By command of his senior it would follow a long-established convention; and, conscious that it was colourless and tiresome, without passion or fire, he would blurt it out to the jurymen, then gallop away through rain and mud to the railway station, thence to town, where he would be sent