seen all of
you to-day on the river and afterwards there ... on the other shore ...
with these charming, fine girls. How attentive, well-bred, obliging you
all were--but scarcely have you taken leave of them, when you are drawn
to public women. Let each one of you imagine for a moment, that we all
had been visiting his sisters and straight from them had driven to Yama
... What? Is such a supposition pleasant?"

"Yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of society,"
pompously remarked Boris Sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat supercilious and
affected young man, upon whom the short, white summer uniform jacket,
which scarcely covered his fat posteriors, the modish trousers, of a
military cut, the PINCE-NEZ on a broad, black ribbon, and a cap after a
Prussian model, all bestowed the air of a coxcomb. "Surely, it isn't
more respectable to enjoy the caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry
on an intrigue on the side with another man's wife? What am I to do if
woman is indispensable to me!"

"Eh, very indispensable indeed!" said Yarchenko with vexation and
feebly made a despondent gesture.

But here a student who was called Ramses in the friendly coterie
intervened. This was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small
stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a broad
forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald spots at the
temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin. He led a mode of life
sufficiently queer for a student. While his colleagues employed
themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in
study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable
suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary,
land and other business law-suits, into the memorizing and logical
analysis of quashed decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in
the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a
notary's for another as a secretary to a justice of the peace, while
all of the past year, being in the last term, he had conducted in a
local newspaper the reports of the city council and had borne the
modest duty of an assistant to a secretary in the management of a
syndicate of sugar manufacturers. And when this same syndicate
commenced the well-known suit against one of its members, Colonel
Baskakov, who had put up the surplus sugar for sale contrary to
agreement, Ramses from the very beginning guessed beforehand and very
s