?" "I want to paint a panel for the Paris exhibition.
Suggest a subject." (A wearisome lady.)

* * * * *

The idle, so-called governing, classes cannot remain long without war.
When there is no war they are bored, idleness fatigues and irritates
them, they do not know what they live for; they bite one another, try
to say unpleasant things to one another, if possible with impunity,
and the best of them make the greatest efforts not to bore the others
and themselves. But when war comes, it possesses all, takes hold of
the imagination, and the common misfortune unites all.

* * * * *

An unfaithful wife is a large cold cutlet which one does not want to
touch, because some one else has had it in his hands.

* * * * *

An old maid writes a treatise: "The tramline of piety."

* * * * *

Ryzeborsky, Tovbin, Gremoukhin, Koptin.

* * * * *

She had not sufficient skin on her face; in order to open her eyes she
had to shut her mouth and _vice versa_.

* * * * *

When she raises her skirt and shows her lace petticoat, it is obvious
that she dresses like a woman who is accustomed to be seen by men.

* * * * *

X. philosophizes: "Take the word 'nose.' In Russia it seems something
unmentionable means the deuce knows what, one may say the indecent
part of the body, and in French it means wedding." And indeed X.'s
nose was an indecent part of the body.

* * * * *

A girl, flirting, chatters: "All are afraid of me ... men, and
the wind ... all leave me alone! I shall never marry." And at home
poverty, her father a regular drunkard. And if people could see how
she and her mother work, how she screens her father, they would feel
the deepest respect for her and would wonder why she is so ashamed of
poverty and work, and is not ashamed of that chatter.

* * * * *

A restaurant. An advanced conversation Andrey Andreyevitch, a
good-natured bourgeois, suddenly declares: "Do you know gentlemen,
I was once an anarchist!" Every one is astonished. A.A. tells the
following tale: a strict father; a technical school opened in the
provincial town in a craze for technical education; they have no ideas
and they did not know what to teach (since, if you are g