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"If we finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and not some wretched hole. Really, gentlemen, let's better go to Treppel's alongside; there it's clean and light, at any rate." "If you please, if you please, signior," insisted Lichonin, opening the door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and spreading his arms before him. "If you please."

The tired pianists and musicians played as in a delirium, in a doze, through mechanical habit. This was towards the waning of the night. Altogether unexpectedly, seven students, a sub-professor, and a local reporter walked into the establishment of Anna Markovna.

"By the way, we met in England last spring a young sub-professor, Horace Bradford, a most unusual young man for nowadays, but of old New England stock. He was one of Sylvia's literature instructors at Rockcliffe College, and he joined our party during the month we spent in the Shakespeare country.

Yarchenko was the last to go. He averred a headache and fatigue. But scarcely had he gone out of the house when the reporter seized Lichonin by the hand and quickly dragged him into the glass vestibule of the entrance. "Look!" he said, pointing to the street. And through the orange glass of the little coloured window Lichonin saw the sub-professor, who was ringing at Treppel's.

There was Tolpygin, Ramses, a certain sub-professor Yarchenko Borya Sobashnikov, and others ... I don't recall. We had been boat-riding the whole evening, then dived into a publican's, and only after that, like swine, started for the Yamkas. I, you know, am a very abstemious man. I only sat and soaked up cognac, like a sponge, with a certain reporter I know.

I used to notice that he did not associate much with the other fellows; and yet he was the best runner and boxer in the class. He was the only fellow in the university who could do the giant swing on the bar, and, though he had never taken lessons, it was next to impossible for any one but Wayland, the sub-professor in chemistry, to touch him with the foils.

"Once, somehow, they saddled me with the arrangement of this benefit performance in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers some clean-shaven haughty visage, but ... What shall it be, gentlemen?" Lichonin answered good-naturedly: "Why, drag him here. Perhaps he's funny." "And you?" the sub-professor turned to Platonov. "It's all the same to me. I know him slightly.

Lichonin, for the sake of assurance, sat down beside the sub-professor, having embraced him around the waist and seated him on his knees and those of his neighbour, the little Tolpygin, a rosy, pleasant-faced boy on whose face, despite his twenty-three years, the childish white down soft and light still showed. "The station is at Doroshenko's!" called out Lichonin after the cabbies driving off.

The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth; Sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears. But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies and bitter scheming which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing.

At the age of twenty he went to Paris and entered the Conservatoire, where in 1804 he was awarded first prize for violin playing, and became a sub-professor. The Empress Josephine, on hearing him play, was so pleased that she granted him a pension of twelve hundred francs.