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'And fancy, what she has to be conceited about, avec sa mine de grisette!'

'It's clear you have never seen any grisettes,' my father observed to her.

'Thank God, I haven't!'

'Thank God, to be sure ... only how can you form an opinion of them, then?'

To me Zinaida had paid no attention whatever. Soon after dinner the princess got up to go.

'I shall rely on your kind offices, Maria Nikolaevna and Piotr Vassilitch,' she said in a doleful sing-song to my mother and father. 'I've no help for it! There were days, but they are over. Here I am, an excellency, and a poor honour it is with nothing to eat!'

My father made her a respectful bow and escorted her to the door of the hall.

I was standing there in my short jacket, staring at the floor, like a man under sentence of death.

Zinaida's treatment of me had crushed me utterly.

What was my astonishment, when, as she passed me, she whispered quickly with her former kind expression in her eyes: 'Come to see us at eight, do you hear, be sure...' I simply threw up my hands, but already she was gone, flinging a white scarf over her head.

At eight o'clock precisely, in my tail-coat and with my hair brushed up into a tuft on my head, I entered the passage of the lodge, where the princess lived.

The old servant looked crossly at me and got up unwillingly from his bench.

There was a sound of merry voices in the drawing-room.

I opened the door and fell back in amazement.

In the middle of the room was the young princess, standing on a chair, holding a man's hat in front of her; round the chair crowded some half a dozen men.

They were trying to put their hands into the hat, while she held it above their heads, shaking it violently.

On seeing me, she cried, 'Stay, stay, another guest, he must have a ticket too,' and leaping lightly down from the chair she took me by the cuff of my coat 'Come along,' she said, 'why are you standing still? Messieurs, let me make you acquainted: this is M'sieu Voldemar, the son of our neighbour.

And this,' she went on, addressing me, and indicating her guests in turn, 'Count Malevsky, Doctor Lushin, Meidanov the poet, the retired captain Nirmatsky, and Byelovzorov the hussar, whom you've seen already.

I hope you will be good friends.' I was so confused that I did not even bow to any one; in Doctor Lushin I recognised the dark man who had so mercilessly put me to shame in the garden; the others were unknown to me.

'Count!' continued Zinaida, 'write M'sieu Voldemar a ticket.'

'That's not fair,' was objected in a slight Polish accent by the count, a very handsome and fashionably dressed brunette, with expressive brown eyes, a thin little white nose, and delicate little moustaches over a tiny mouth. 'This gentleman has not been playing forfeits with us.'

'It's unfair,' repeated in chorus Byelovzorov and the gentleman described as a retired captain, a man of forty, pock-marked to a hideous degree, curly-headed as a negro, round-shouldered, bandy-legged, and dressed in a military coat without epaulets, worn unbuttoned.

'Write him a ticket, I tell you,' repeated the young princess. 'What's this mutiny? M'sieu Voldemar is with us for the first time, and there are no rules for him yet. It's no use grumbling – write it, I wish it.'

The count shrugged his shoulders but bowed submissively, took the pen in his white, ring-bedecked fingers, tore off a scrap of paper and wrote on it.

Chapter VII

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