“Okh, bear in mind: Too much poking in books is bad for the poke!” said Tikhon Ilitch, shaking his head, and making a grimace. “However, that’s no affair of ours.”
“Well, that’s not the way I look at it,” retorted Kuzma. “I, brother—how shall I put it to you?—I’m a strange Russian type.”
“I’m a Russian man myself, bear that in mind,” interposed Tikhon Ilitch.
“But another sort. I don’t mean to say that I’m better than you, but—I’m different. Now here are you, I see, priding yourself on being a Russian, while I, brother, okh! am very far from being a Slavophil! It’s not proper to jabber much, but one thing I will say: for God’s sake, don’t brag of being a Russian! We’re an uncivilized people and an extremely unreliable one—neither candle for God nor oven-fork for the devil. But we will discuss this as time goes on.”
Tikhon Ilitch contracted his brows, drummed on the table with his fingers. “That’s right, probably,” he said, and slowly filled his glass. “We’re a savage lot. A crack-brained race.”
“Well, and that’s precisely the point. I have, I may say, roamed about the world a good bit. Well, and what then? Absolutely nowhere have I seen more tiresome and lazy types. And those who are not lazy”—here Kuzma shot a sidelong look at his brother—“have no sense at all. They toil and strive and acquire a nest for themselves; but where’s the sense in it, after all?”
“What do you mean by that? What’s sense?” asked Tikhon Ilitch.
“Just what I say. One must use sense in making one’s nest. I’ll weave me a nest, says the man, and then I’ll live as a man should. In this way and in that.”
Here Kuzma tapped his breast and his brow with his finger.
Tikhon Ilitch poured himself out another glass of liquor. Kuzma, having donned a silver-framed pair of eyeglasses, sipped the boiling-hot amber fluid from his saucer. Tikhon Ilitch gazed at him with beaming eyes; and after turning something over in his mind, he said: “Evidently, brother, that sort of thing is not for the likes of us. If you live in the country, sup your coarse cabbage-soup and wear wretched bast-shoes. Do as your neighbours do!”