The newly wealthy merchant Anempodist Ravilovich Podprugin, a man of about fifty, very well preserved—without a single gray hair in his thick beard or at his temples, though he had a large belly—was lying in his richly appointed study on the sofa, indulging in comfort. He had just had lunch, was in an expensive silk dressing gown, and was speaking to his wife, who was leafing through the magazine “Niva” near his desk:
“Now I look around us, Olga Savishna, I peer about and can’t for the life of me think what else we might still be missing. Everything is there—that’s what we’ve reached.”