His Excellency, with two stars on his dress-coat, was walking up to her.  Yes, His Excellency was walking straight towards her, for he was staring directly at her with a sugary smile, while he licked his lips as he always did when he saw a pretty woman.

“Delighted, delighted . . .” he began.  “I shall order your husband to be clapped in a lock-up for keeping such a treasure hidden from us till now.  I’ve come to you with a message from my wife,” he went on, offering her his arm.  “You must help us. . . .  M-m-yes. . . .  We ought to give you the prize for beauty as they do in America . . . .  M-m-yes. . . .  The Americans. . . .  My wife is expecting you impatiently.”

He led her to a stall and presented her to a middle-aged lady, the lower part of whose face was disproportionately large, so that she looked as though she were holding a big stone in her mouth.

“You must help us,” she said through her nose in a sing-song voice.  “All the pretty women are working for our charity bazaar, and you are the only one enjoying yourself.  Why won’t you help us?”

She went away, and Anna took her place by the cups and the silver samovar.  She was soon doing a lively trade.  Anna asked no less than a rouble for a cup of tea, and made the huge officer drink three cups.  Artynov, the rich man with prominent eyes, who suffered from asthma, came up, too; he was not dressed in the strange costume in which Anna had seen him in the summer at the station, but wore a dress-coat like every one else.  Keeping his eyes fixed on Anna, he drank a glass of champagne and paid a hundred roubles for it, then drank some tea and gave another hundred—­all this without saying a word, as he was short of breath through asthma. . . .  Anna invited purchasers and got money out of them, firmly convinced by now that her smiles and glances could not fail to afford these people great pleasure.  She realized now that she was created exclusively for this noisy, brilliant, laughing life, with its music, its dancers, its adorers, and her old terror of a force that was sweeping down upon her and menacing to crush her seemed to her ridiculous:  she was afraid of no one now, and only regretted that her mother could not be there to rejoice at her success.

Pyotr Leontyitch, pale by now but still steady on his legs, came up to the stall and asked for a glass of brandy.  Anna turned crimson, expecting him to say something inappropriate (she was already ashamed of having such a poor and ordinary father); but he emptied his glass, took ten roubles out of his roll of notes, flung it down, and walked away with dignity without uttering a word.  A little later she saw him dancing in the grand chain, and by now he was staggering and kept shouting something, to the great confusion of his partner; and Anna remembered how at the ball three years before he had staggered and shouted in the same way, and it had ended in the police-sergeant’s taking him home to bed, and next day the director had threatened to dismiss him from his post.  How inappropriate that memory was!