t, I am certainly not."

From a third group:

"We ought to give them a good smacking and send them flying."

"Pull down the hall!"

From a fourth group:

"I wonder the Lembkes are not ashamed to look on!"

"Why should they be ashamed? You are not."

"Yes, I am ashamed, and he is the governor."

"And you are a pig."

"I've never seen such a commonplace ball in my life," a lady observed
viciously, quite close to Yulia Mihailovna, obviously with the intention
of being overheard. She was a stout lady of forty with rouge on her
cheeks, wearing a bright-coloured silk dress. Almost every one in the
town knew her, but no one received her. She was the widow of a civil
councillor, who had left her a wooden house and a small pension; but
she lived well and kept horses. Two months previously she had called on
Yulia Mihailovna, but the latter had not received her.

"That might have been foreseen," she added, looking insolently into
Yulia Mihailovna's face.

"If you could foresee it, why did you come?" Yulia Mihailovna could not
resist saying.

"Because I was too simple," the sprightly lady answered instantly, up in
arms and eager for the fray; but the general intervened.

_"Chere dame"_--he bent over to Yulia Mihailovna--"you'd really better be
going. We are only in their way and they'll enjoy themselves thoroughly
without us. You've done your part, you've opened the ball, now leave
them in peace. And Andrey Antonovitch doesn't seem to be feeling quite
satisfactorily.... To avoid trouble."

But it was too late.

All through the quadrille Andrey Antonovitch gazed at the dancers with a
sort of angry perplexity, and when he heard the comments of the audience
he began looking about him uneasily. Then for the first time he caught
sight of some of the persons who had come from the refreshment-room;
there was an expression of extreme wonder in his face. Suddenly there
was a loud roar of laughter at a caper that was cut in the quadrille.
The editor of the "menacing periodical, not a Petersburg one," who was
dancing with the cudgel in his hands, felt utterly unable to endure
the spectacled gaze of "honest Russian thought," and not knowing how to
escape it, suddenly in the last figure advanced to meet him standing on
his head, which was meant, by the way, to typify the continual turning
upside down of common sense by the menacing non-Petersburg gazette. As
Lyamshin was the only one who could walk standing on his head, he ha