Their voices were no longer raised, however, and their talk was quiet, sad, friendly talk.
Mihalevitch set off the next day, in spite of all Lavretsky's efforts to keep him.

Fedor Ivanitch did not succeed in persuading him to remain; but he talked to him to his heart's content.

Mihalevitch, it appeared, had not a penny to bless himself with.

Lavretsky had noticed with pain the evening before all the tokens and habits of years of poverty; his boots were shabby, a button was off on the back of his coat, on his arrival, he had not even thought of asking to wash, and at supper he ate like a shark, tearing his meat in his fingers, and crunching the bones with his strong black teeth.

It appeared, too, that he had made nothing out of his employment, that he now rested all his hopes on the contractor who was taking him solely in order to have an "educated man" in his office.
For all that Mihalevitch was not discouraged, but as idealist or cynic, lived on a crust of bread, sincerely rejoicing or grieving over the destinies of humanity, and his own vocation, and troubling himself very little as to how to escape dying of hunger.