“You need not apologise. I’m not afraid of you. Once I was only the son of a flunkey, but now I’ve become a flunkey myself, like you. Our Russian liberal is a flunkey before everything, and is only looking for someone whose boots he can clean.”
“What boots? What allegory is this?”
“Allegory, indeed! You are laughing, I see.… Stepan Trofimovitch said truly that I lie under a stone, crushed but not killed, and do nothing but wriggle. It was a good comparison of his.”
“Stepan Trofimovitch declares that you are mad over the Germans,” I laughed. “We’ve borrowed something from them anyway.”
“We took twenty kopecks, but we gave up a hundred roubles of our own.”
We were silent a minute.
“He got that sore lying in America.”
“Who? What sore?”
“I mean Kirillov. I spent four months with him lying on the floor of a hut.”
“Why, have you been in America?” I asked, surprised. “You never told me about it.”