He was wearing an old and hopelessly ragged black dress coat, with all its buttons missing except one, which he had buttoned, evidently wishing to preserve his respectability. A crumpled shirt front covered with spots and stains, protruded from his canvas waistcoat. Like a clerk, he did not have a beard or a moustache, but had been so long unshaven that his chin looked like a stiff grayish brush. And there was also something respectable and official about his manner. But he was restless; he ruffled up his hair and from time to time let his head drop into his hands dejectedly resting his ragged elbows on the stained and sticky table. At last he looked straight at Raskolnikov, and said loudly and resolutely:

“May I venture, dear sir, to engage you in polite conversation? For although your exterior would not command respect, my experience distinguishes in you a man of education and not accustomed to drinking. I have always respected education united with genuine feelings, and I am besides a titular councilor in rank. Marmeladov—that is my name; titular councilor. May I inquire—have you been in the service?”

“No, I am studying,” answered the young man, somewhat surprised at the grand style of the speaker and also at being so directly addressed. In spite of the momentary desire he had just been feeling for company of any sort, when he was actually spoken to he felt his habitual irritable uneasiness at any stranger who approached or attempted to approach him.

“A student then, or a former student,” cried the clerk. “Just what I thought! I’m a man of experience, immense experience, sir,” and he tapped his forehead with his fingers in self-approval. “You’ve been a student or have attended some learned institution! . . . But allow me ... ” He got up, staggered, took up his jug and glass, and sat down beside the young man, facing him a little sideways. He was drunk, but spoke fluently and boldly, only occasionally losing the thread of his sentences and drawling his words. He pounced upon Raskolnikov as greedily as though he too had not spoken to a soul for a month.

“Dear sir,” he began almost with solemnity, “poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But destitution, dear sir, destitution is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in destitution—never—no-one. For destitution a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, for in destitution I am the first to humiliate myself. Hence the tavern! Dear sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me! Do you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?”

“No, I haven’t,” answered Raskolnikov. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve just come from one and it’s the fifth night . . . ” He filled his glass, emptied it and paused. Bits of hay were in fact clinging to his clothes and sticking to his hair. It seemed quite probable that he had not undressed or washed for the last five days.