A right little peasant cottage, you understand: shiny glass ten feet wide in the windows, if you can picture it, so the vases and whatnot in the rooms seem as if they’re outside—you could, in a certain way, reach them from the street with your hand; precious marbles on the walls, metal gewgaws, the sort of handle on the door, you know, that you’d have to stop at the grocer’s first and buy a half-kopeck’s worth of soap and rub your hands with it for two hours before you dared take hold of it—in short, there’s such lacquers all over everything, in a certain way, it boggles the mind. The
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Description of Kopekin’s cheap and dirty lodgings
