imagination of the prostitutes,
excited their exhausted sensuality and professional curiosity, and all
of them, almost enamoured, would walk in their steps, jealous and
bickering with one another.

There was one incident when Simeon had let into the room an elderly
man, dressed like a bourgeois. There was nothing exceptional about him;
he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-looking cheek-bones,
protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a beard like a wedge, bushy
eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher than the other. Having entered, he
raised his fingers, folded for the sign of the cross, to his forehead,
but having searched the corners with his eyes and finding no image, he
did not in the least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with
a business-like air walked up to the fattest girl in the
establishment--Kitty.

"Let's go!" he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his head
in the direction of the door.

During the entire period of her absence the omniscious Simeon, with a
mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform Niura, at
that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with horror in her
rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the name of the bourgeois
was Dyadchenko, and that last fall he had volunteered, owing to the
absence of the hangman, to carry out the execution of eleven rioters,
and with his own hands had hung them in two mornings. And--monstrous as
it may be--at that hour there was not in the establishment a single
girl who did not feel envy toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience
a painful, keen, vertiginous curiosity. When Dyadchenko was going away
half an hour later--with his sedate and stern air, all the women
speechlessly, with their mouths gaping, escorted him to the street door
and afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the
street. Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and
overwhelmed her with interrogations. They looked with a new feeling,
almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms, at the bed,
still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble, which Kitty showed
them, having taken it out of her stocking. Kitty could tell them
nothing. "A man like any man, like all men," she said with a calm
incomprehension; but when she found out who her visitor had been, she
suddenly burst into tears, without herself knowing why.

This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of man
can picture, th