solve to enter, as that was too swell for them. But at Anna
Markovna's they at once ordered a quadrille and danced it, especially
the fifth figure, where the gents execute a solo, perfectly, like real
Parisians, even putting their thumbs in the arm holes of their vests.
But they did not want to remain with the girls; instead, they promised
to come later, when they had wound up the complete review of the
brothels.

And there also came and went government clerks of some sort; crisp
young people in patent leather boots; several students; several
officers, who were horribly afraid of losing their dignity in the eyes
of the proprietress and the guests of the brothel. Little by little in
the drawing room was created such a noisy, fumy setting that no one
there any longer felt ill at ease. There came a steady visitor, the
lover of Sonka the Rudder, who came almost every day and sat whole
hours through near his beloved, gazed upon her with languishing
oriental eyes, sighed, grew faint and created scenes for her because
she lives in a brothel, because she sins against the Sabbath, because
she eats meat not prepared in the orthodox Hebrew manner, and because
she has strayed from the family and the great Hebrew church.

As a usual thing--and this happened often--Zociya the housekeeper would
walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say, twisting her
lips:

"Well, what are you sitting there for mister? Warming your behind? You
might go and pass the time with the young lady."

Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel, and
must have been created by God himself for a tender, passionate, mutual
love; but many circumstances--as, for example, the pogrom which took
place in their town, impoverishment, a complete confusion, fright--had
for a time parted them. However, love was so great that the junior drug
clerk Neiman, with great difficulty, efforts, and humiliations,
contrived to find for himself the place of a junior in one of the local
pharmacies, and had searched out the girl he loved. He was a real,
orthodox Hebrew, almost fanatical. He knew that Sonka had been sold by
her very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many
humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from hand
to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul writhed and
shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was above all. And
every evening he would appear in the drawing room of Anna