'To be sure, you noble gentlemen,' Baburin muttered between his teeth, '. . . use other men's hands . . . to poke up your fire . . . that's what you like.'
In the most conspicuous place in his room hung the well-known lithograph portrait of Belinsky; on the table lay a volume of the old Polar Star, edited by Bestuzhev.
A long time passed, and Baburin did not come back after the cook had called him away. Musa looked several times uneasily towards the door by which he had gone out. At last she could bear it no longer; she got up, and with an apology she too went out by the same door. A quarter of an hour later she came back with her husband; the faces of both, so at least I thought, looked troubled. But all of a sudden Baburin's face assumed a different, an intensely bitter, almost frenzied expression.
'What will be the end of it?' he began all at once in a jerky, sobbing voice, utterly unlike him, while his wild eyes shifted restlessly about him. 'One goes on living and living, and hoping that maybe it'll be better, that one will breathe more freely; but it's quite the other way—everything gets worse and worse! They have squeezed us right up to the wall! In my youth I bore all with patience; they . . . maybe . . . beat me . . . even . . . yes!' he added, turning sharply round on his heels and swooping down as it were, upon me: 'I, a man of full age, was
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