clean forgot him, and remembered only when well on his way that he had not tipped the footman. “Ah well,” he thought, “it cannot be helped now.”
The driver mounted the box and gathered up the reins, and, sitting sideways, touched up the horses. The bells clanked, and the Petersburg gentleman, rocked on the soft springs of the calèche, drove away, his thoughts full of the narrowness of his friend’s view.
Nicholas Semyónovitch, who had not gone to his wife at once, was thinking the same about his friend. “The shallow narrowness of these Petersburgers is awful, and they can’t get out of it,” he thought. He shrank from going to his wife, because he did not expect anything good from the interview at that moment. It was all on account of some strawberries. In the morning Nicholas Semyónovitch had bought, without even bargaining, two platefuls of not very ripe wild strawberries which some peasant boys were selling. His children came running and asking for some, and began eating them straight from the boys’ plates. Marie had not yet come down. When she came and heard that Gógo, whose stomach was already out of order, had been given strawberries, she became extremely angry. She reproached her husband, and he reproached her; so that they had some very unpleasant words—almost a quarrel.
Towards evening some unsatisfactory symptoms really showed themselves, but Nicholas Semyónovitch thought that after that everything would be all right. However, the fact that the doctor was called proved that things had taken a bad turn.
When he did go in, he found his wife in the nursery, dressed in a favourite bright-coloured silk dressing-gown, about which, however, she was not thinking at that moment, and holding a guttering candle for the doctor, who, with his pince-nez on his nose and a very attentive expression on his face, was carefully making an examination. “Yes,” she said meaningly, “it is all on account of those confounded strawberries.”