tired of one another; the songs had all been sung, and had got mixed in everyone’s head, leaving a kind of noisy, dissolute impression behind. No matter what strange and dashing thing anyone did, it began to occur to everyone that there was nothing amiable or funny in it. The Captain of Police, who lay in a shocking state on the floor at the feet of an old woman, began kicking his legs and shouting, “Champagne! … the Count’s come! … champagne … he’s come … now then, champagne! … I’ll have a champagne bath, and bathe in it! Noble gentlemen! … I love the society of our brave old nobility … Styóshka, sing ‘The Pathway.’ ”
The cavalryman was also rather tipsy, but in another manner. He sat on a sofa in the corner very close to a tall, handsome gipsy, Lubásha; and feeling his eyes misty with drink, he kept blinking and shaking his head, and, repeating the same words over and over again in a whisper, besought the gipsy to fly with him somewhere. Lubásha smiled and listened as if what he said were very amusing and yet rather sad, and glancing occasionally at her husband—the squinting Sáshka, who was standing beyond the chair in front of her—in reply to the cavalryman’s declarations of love, stooped and, whispering in his ear, asked him to buy her some scent and a ribbon on the quiet so that the others should not know.
“Hurrah!” cried the cavalryman when the Count entered.
The handsome young man was pacing up and down the room with laboriously steady steps and a careworn expression on his face, warbling an air from The Revolt in the Serail . An elderly paterfamilias, tempted to come and hear the gipsies by the persistent entreaties of the noble gentlemen, who said that without him the thing would be worthless and it would be better not to go at all, was lying on a sofa where he had sunk as soon as he arrived, and no one took any notice of him. Some official or other who was there had taken off his swallowtail coat and was sitting up on the table feet and all, ruffling his hair and thereby demonstrating that