Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and broke into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another, and again subsided into their pillows.

“Engaged!  A lieutenant!” Kryukov jeered.

“Married!” retorted Sokolsky.  “Highly respected!  Father of a family!”

At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another, and, to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with laughter into their dinner-napkins.  After dinner, still in the best of spirits, they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another with guns, played at soldiers with the children.  In the evening they had a long argument.  The lieutenant maintained that it was mean and contemptible to accept a dowry with your wife, even when there was passionate love on both sides.  Kryukov thumped the table with his fists and declared that this was absurd, and that a husband who did not like his wife to have property of her own was an egoist and a despot.  Both shouted, boiled over, did not understand each other, drank a good deal, and in the end, picking up the skirts of their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms.  They soon fell asleep and slept soundly.

Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow.  The shadows lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time to time the wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature, too, could lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity of these people.  Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing.  Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud.  Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.

On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov was sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory letter to his aunt.  Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro near the table in silence.  The lieutenant had slept badly that night; he woke up depressed, and now he felt bored.  He paced up and down, thinking of the end of his furlough, of his fiancee, who was expecting him, of how people could live all their lives in the country without feeling bored.  Standing at the window, for a long time he stared at the trees, smoked three cigarettes one after another, and suddenly turned to his cousin.

“I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha,” he said.  “Let me have a saddle-horse for the day. . . .”

Kryukov looked searchingly at him and continued his writing with a frown.

“You will, then?” asked the lieutenant.

Kryukov looked at him again, then deliberately drew out a drawer in the table, and taking out a thick roll of notes, gave it to his cousin.

“Here’s five thousand . . .” he said.  “Though it’s not my money, yet, God bless you, it’s all the same.  I advise you to send for post-horses at once and go away.  Yes, really!”