"It's a good long time since we saw you, honoured sir," said the old man--"a good long time. Well, am I to congratulate you on entering the state of holy matrimony? Very well, then; I congratulate you."
And he put his lips out to be kissed. Laptev bent down and kissed him.
"Well, have you brought your young lady?" the old man asked, and without waiting for an answer, he said, addressing the customer: "'Herewith I beg to inform you, father, that I'm going to marry such and such a young lady.' Yes. But as for asking for his father's counsel or blessing, that's not in the rules nowadays. Now they go their own way. When I married I was over forty, but I went on my knees to my father and asked his advice. Nowadays we've none of that."
The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it unseemly to show his affection or make any display of his joy. His voice and his manner of saying "your young lady" brought back to Laptev the depression he had always felt in the warehouse. Here every trifling detail reminded him of the past, when he used to be flogged and put on Lenten fare; he knew that even now boys were thrashed and punched in the face till their noses bled, and that when those boys grew up they would beat others. And before he had been five minutes in the warehouse, he always felt as though he were being scolded or punched in the face.
Fyodor slapped the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother:
"Here, Alyosha, I must introduce our Tambov benefactor, Grigory Timofeitch. He might serve as an example for the young men of the day; he's passed his fiftieth birthday, and he has tiny children."
The clerks laughed, and the customer, a lean old man with a pale face, laughed too.
"Nature above the normal capacity," observed the head-clerk, who was standing at the counter close by. "It always comes out when it's there."
The head-clerk--a tall man of fifty, in spectacles, with a dark beard, and a pencil behind his ear--usually expressed his ideas vaguely in roundabout hints, while his sly smile betrayed that he attached particular significance to his words. He liked to obscure his utterances with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and many such words he used in a wrong sense. For instance, the word "except." When he had expressed some opinion positively and did not want to be contradicted, he would stretch out his hand and pronounce:
"Except!"