"You're fibbing, little one, but come along."
He resisted for a while, but it was clear that he was glad to let Liudmilla take him away with her. And Liudmilla brought him home.
"I've found him," she said to her sisters triumphantly, and taking Sasha by the shoulders, she led him into her room.
Sasha, putting his hands inside his belt, stood uneasily in the middle of the room, and felt both happy and sad. There seemed to be an odour of new pleasant scents there, and in this odour there was something that provoked and irritated the nerves like the contact of living rough little snakes.
[1] "Rosotchki" means "little roses" and also "rods" and "strokes from a rod."
[CHAPTER XVIII]
Peredonov was returning from the lodgings of one of his pupils. Quite suddenly he was caught in a drizzling rain. He tried to think where he could shelter for a while, so as not to spoil his new silk umbrella in the rain. Across the way was a detached, two-storeyed, stone house; on it was the brass plate of the Notary Public, Goudayevsky. The notary's son was a pupil in the second form of the gymnasia. Peredonov decided to go in. Incidentally he would make a complaint against the notary's son.
He found both parents at home. They met him with a good deal of fuss. Everything was done there in that way.
Nikolai Mikhailovitch Goudayevsky was a short, robust, dark man, bald and with a long beard. His movements were impetuous and unexpected. He seemed not to walk but to flutter along. He was small like a sparrow, and it was always impossible to tell from his face and attitude what he would do the next minute. In the midst of a serious conversation he would suddenly throw out his knee, which would not so much amuse people as perplex them as to his motive. At home or when visiting he would sit quiet for a long time and then suddenly jump up without any visible cause, pace quickly up and down the room, and exclaim or knock something. In the street he would walk, then suddenly pause, or make some gesture or gymnastic exercise, and then he would continue his walk. On the documents which he drew up or attested Goudayevsky liked to write ridiculous remarks, as, for example, instead of writing about Ivan Ivanitch Ivanov that he lived on the Moscow Square in Ermillova's house, he would write Ivan Ivanitch Ivanov who lived on the Market Square in that quarter where it was impossible to breathe for the stench; and so forth; and he even made a note sometimes of the number of geese and hens kept by the man whose signature he was attesting.