un. After their flat Anna was
overwhelmed by the lights, the bright colours, the music, the noise,
and looking round the room, thought, "Oh, how lovely!" She at once
distinguished in the crowd all her acquaintances, every one she had
met before at parties or on picnics--all the officers, the teachers,
the lawyers, the officials, the landowners, His Excellency, Artynov,
and the ladies of the highest standing, dressed up and very
_decollettees_, handsome and ugly, who had already taken up their
positions in the stalls and pavilions of the charity bazaar, to
begin selling things for the benefit of the poor. A huge officer
in epaulettes--she had been introduced to him in Staro-Kievsky
Street when she was a schoolgirl, but now she could not remember
his name--seemed to spring from out of the ground, begging her
for a waltz, and she flew away from her husband, feeling as though
she were floating away in a sailing-boat in a violent storm, while
her husband was left far away on the shore. She danced passionately,
with fervour, a waltz, then a polka and a quadrille, being snatched
by one partner as soon as she was left by another, dizzy with music
and the noise, mixing Russian with French, lisping, laughing, and
with no thought of her husband or anything else. She excited great
admiration among the men--that was evident, and indeed it could
not have been otherwise; she was breathless with excitement, felt
thirsty, and convulsively clutched her fan. Pyotr Leontyitch, her
father, in a crumpled dress-coat that smelt of benzine, came up to
her, offering her a plate of pink ice.

"You are enchanting this evening," he said, looking at her rapturously,
"and I have never so much regretted that you were in such a hurry
to get married. . . . What was it for? I know you did it for our
sake, but . . ." With a shaking hand he drew out a roll of notes
and said: "I got the money for my lessons today, and can pay your
husband what I owe him."

She put the plate back into his hand, and was pounced upon by some
one and borne off to a distance. She caught a glimpse over her
partner's shoulder of her father gliding over the floor, putting
his arm round a lady and whirling down the ball-room with her.

"How sweet he is when he is sober!" she thought.

She danced the mazurka with the same huge officer; he moved gravely,
as heavily as a dead carcase in a uniform, twitched his shoulders
and his chest, stamped his feet very languidly--he felt fearf