rd and a manly
face; and as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he
had reached the age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and
bald. By mind and temperament he was one of those natures in which
the Russian intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted,
good-natured, well-bred, having some knowledge of the arts and
sciences, some faith, and the most chivalrous notions about honour,
but indolent and lacking in depth. He was fond of good eating and
drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a connoisseur in women and
horses, but in other things he was apathetic and sluggish as a seal,
and to rouse him from his lethargy something extraordinary and quite
revolting was needed, and then he would forget everything in the
world and display intense activity; he would fume and talk of a
duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at
breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly "a
scoundrel," would go to law, and so on.

"How is it our Sasha's not back yet?" he kept asking his wife,
glancing out of window. "Why, it's dinner-time!"

After waiting for the lieutenant till six o'clock, they sat down
to dinner. When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was
listening to every footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept
shrugging his shoulders.

"Strange!" he said. "The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant's."

As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant's, where after a
festive evening he was staying the night.

Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked extremely
crumpled and confused.

"I want to speak to you alone . . ." he said mysteriously to his
cousin.

They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced
for a long time up and down before he began to speak.

"Something's happened, my dear fellow," he began, "that I don't
know how to tell you about. You wouldn't believe it . . ."

And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what
had happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide
apart and his head bent, listened and frowned.

"Are you joking?" he asked.

"How the devil could I be joking? It's no joking matter!"

"I don't understand!" muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging
up his hands. "It's positively . . . immoral on your part. Before
your very eyes a hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious
cr