midday
This was rather a large room , but owing to the perpetual darkness , the low-pitched ceiling , the piles of boxes and bales , and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it , it made as unpleasant an impression on a newcomer as the others . In the offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales , in bundles and in cardboard boxes on the shelves ; there was no order nor neatness in the arrangement of it , and if crimson threads , tassels , ends of fringe , had not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels , no one could have guessed what was being bought and sold here . And looking at these crumpled paper parcels and boxes , no one would have believed that a million was being made out of such trash , and that fifty men were employed every day in this warehouse , not counting the buyers . When at midday , on the day after his arrival at Moscow , Laptev went into the warehouse , the workmen packing the goods were hammering so loudly that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in . A postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in his hand ; he was wincing at the noise , and he did not notice Laptev either . The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor Fyodorovitch , who was so like him that they passed for twins . This resemblance always reminded Laptev of his own personal appearance , and now , seeing before him a short , red-faced man with rather thin hair , with narrow plebeian hips , looking so uninteresting and so unintellectual , he asked himself : `` Can I really look like that ? ''