the
while, keep capering to right and left like a billy-goat! Mimicry, sheer
mimicry! The fact that the Frenchman is at forty precisely what he was
at fifteen leads us to imagine that we too, forsooth, ought to be the
same. No; a ball leaves one feeling that one has done a wrong thing--so
much so that one does not care even to think of it. It also leaves one's
head perfectly empty, even as does the exertion of talking to a man of
the world. A man of that kind chatters away, and touches lightly upon
every conceivable subject, and talks in smooth, fluent phrases which he
has culled from books without grazing their substance; whereas go and
have a chat with a tradesman who knows at least ONE thing thoroughly,
and through the medium of experience, and see whether his conversation
will not be worth more than the prattle of a thousand chatterboxes. For
what good does one get out of balls? Suppose that a competent writer
were to describe such a scene exactly as it stands? Why, even in a
book it would seem senseless, even as it certainly is in life. Are,
therefore, such functions right or wrong? One would answer that the
devil alone knows, and then spit and close the book."

Such were the unfavourable comments which Chichikov passed upon balls
in general. With it all, however, there went a second source of
dissatisfaction. That is to say, his principal grudge was not so much
against balls as against the fact that at this particular one he had
been exposed, he had been made to disclose the circumstance that he had
been playing a strange, an ambiguous part. Of course, when he reviewed
the contretemps in the light of pure reason, he could not but see that
it mattered nothing, and that a few rude words were of no account now
that the chief point had been attained; yet man is an odd creature, and
Chichikov actually felt pained by the could-shouldering administered to
him by persons for whom he had not an atom of respect, and whose vanity
and love of display he had only that moment been censuring. Still more,
on viewing the matter clearly, he felt vexed to think that he himself
had been so largely the cause of the catastrophe.

Yet he was not angry with HIMSELF--of that you may be sure, seeing that
all of us have a slight weakness for sparing our own faults, and
always do our best to find some fellow-creature upon whom to vent our
displeasure--whether that fellow-creature be a servant, a subordinate
official, or a wife. In the same