"In our disgraceful state no one of us is better than another."
Then he laughed and added boastfully:
"I understand everything from within and without, brother, everything! I am not wood!"
He was a little tipsy, at the jovial stage; he looked at me with the tender pity of a good master for an unintelligent pupil.
Sometimes I met Pavl Odintzov. He was livelier than ever, dressed like a dandy, and talked to me condescendingly and always reproachfully.
"You are throwing yourself away on that kind of work! They are nothing but peasants."
Then he would sadly retail all the latest news from the workshop.
"Jikharev is still taken up with that cow. Sitanov is plainly fretting; he has begun to drink to excess. The wolves have eaten Golovev; he was coming home from Sviatka; he was drunk, and the wolves devoured him." And bursting into a gay peal of laughter he comically added:
"They ate him and they all became drunk themselves! They were very merry and walked about the forests on their hind legs, like performing dogs. Then they fell to fighting and in twenty-fours hours they were all dead!"
I listened to him and laughed, too, but I felt that the workshop and all I had experienced in it was very far away from me now.