“However, last Thursday, when you met her father, for some reason you did not return his bow.”
“I don't like that old blockhead of a Justice,” I said, “and I can't look with equanimity at his phiz; but I still have the strength to bow to him and to press the hand he stretches out to me. Perhaps I did not notice him on Thursday, or I did not recognize him. You're not in a good humour to-day, Screwy, and are trying to pick a quarrel.”
“I love you, my dear boy,” Pavel Ivanovich sighed; “but I don't believe you.… ‘Did not notice, did not recognize’!… I don't require your justifications nor your evasions.… What's the use of them when there's so little truth in them? You're an excellent, a good man, but there's a little bit of a screw sticking in your sick brain that—forgive me for saying it—is capable of any offence.”
“I'm humbly obliged.”
“Don't be offended, golubchek.… God grant that I may be mistaken, but you appear to me to be somewhat of a psychopath. Sometimes, quite in spite of your will and the dictates of your excellent nature, you have attacks of such desires and commit such acts that all who know you as a respectable man are quite nonplussed. You make one marvel how your highly moral principles, which I have the honour of knowing, can exist together with your sudden impulses, which, in the end, produce the most screaming abominations!… What animal is this?” Pavel Ivanovich asked the salesman abruptly in quite another tone, lifting close to his eyes a wooden animal with a man's nose, a mane, and a grey stripe down its back.
“A lion,” the salesman answered, yawning. “Or perhaps some other sort of creature. The deuce only knows!”
From the toy booths we went to the shops where textiles were sold and trade was already very brisk.
“These toys only mislead children,” the doctor said. “They give the falsest ideas of flora and fauna. For example, this lion … striped, purple, and squeaking.… Whoever heard of a lion that squeaks?”
“I say, Screwy,” I began, “you evidently want to say something to me and you seem not to be able.… Go ahead!… I like to hear you, even when you tell me unpleasant things.…”
“Whether pleasant or unpleasant, friend, you must listen to me. There is much I want to talk to you about.”