“If you would only help me, Lisa dear!” said Anna Fyódorovna, with a frightened glance at her daughter. “I don’t know how this is. …”
“But I don’t know this way either,” Lisa answered, mentally reckoning up her mother’s losses. “You will lose very much that way, mama! There will be nothing left for Pímotchka’s new dress,” she added in jest.
“Yes, this way one may easily lose ten roubles silver,” said the Cornet, looking at Lisa, and anxious to enter into conversation with her.
“Are we not playing for ‘assignations’?” said Anna Fyódorovna, looking round at all present.
“I don’t know how we are playing, only I can’t reckon in ‘assignations,’ ” said the Count. “What is it? I mean, what are ‘assignations’?”
“Why, nowadays no one counts by ‘assignations’ any longer,” remarked the uncle, who had played very cautiously, and had been winning.
The old lady ordered some sparkling homemade wine to be brought, drank two glasses, became very red, and seemed to resign herself to any fate. A lock of her grey hair escaped from under her cap, and she did not even put it right. No doubt it seemed to her as if she had lost millions and it was all up with her. The Cornet touched the Count with his foot more and more often. The Count scored down the old lady’s losses. At last the game ended, and in spite of Anna Fyódorovna’s wicked attempts to add to her own score by pretending to make mistakes in adding it up, in spite of her horror at the amount of her losses, it turned out at last that she had lost 920 points. “That’s nine roubles ‘assignations’?” asked Anna Fyódorovna several times, and did not comprehend the full extent of her loss until her brother told her, to her horror, that she had lost more than thirty-two roubles “assignations,” and that she must certainly pay.