bolical suddenness, the quick
transitions, the swift shifting hues. . . . Brrr! And the IOU--
phew! Write it off for lost. We are both great sinners, we'll go
halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not two thousand three
hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at the tenant's."

Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and
broke into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another,
and again subsided into their pillows.

"Engaged! A lieutenant!" Kryukov jeered.

"Married!" retorted Sokolsky. "Highly respected! Father of a family!"

At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another,
and, to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with
laughter into their dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best
of spirits, they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another
with guns, played at soldiers with the children. In the evening
they had a long argument. The lieutenant maintained that it was
mean and contemptible to accept a dowry with your wife, even when
there was passionate love on both sides. Kryukov thumped the table
with his fists and declared that this was absurd, and that a husband
who did not like his wife to have property of her own was an egoist
and a despot. Both shouted, boiled over, did not understand each
other, drank a good deal, and in the end, picking up the skirts of
their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms. They soon fell asleep
and slept soundly.

Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The
shadows lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time
to time the wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature,
too, could lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity
of these people. Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said
nothing. Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident
aloud. Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as
of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played
upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.

On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov
was sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory
letter to his aunt. Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro
near the table in silence. The lieutenant had slept badly that
night; he woke up depressed, and now he felt bored. He paced up and
down, thinking of the end of his furlough, of his fiancee,