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I sat ignored by everyone, crushed and annihilated.

Good Lord, is this fit company for me? I thought. And what a fool I've made of myself before them! [...] The numbskulls think they've done me a favor by letting me sit at their table, they don't understand that it's I, I who am honoring them, a…

I kept going to the window, opening the transom

"But why twenty-one?" I asked with some agitation, perhaps even with resentment. "Counting me, it will be twenty-eight rubles, not twenty-one."

It seemed to me that this sudden and unexpected offer to join in would be a handsome gesture; it would immediately win them over and raise me in their e…

truckled to him for ulterior motives and often borrowed money from him

[...] Either a hero, or mud; there was no middle. Indeed, this is what ruined me, because, mired down in filth, I would console myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero redeemed the filth. As if to say: it would be shameful for an ordinary man to get mired down, but a …