“How old are you?”

“Eighty,” the young lady jested, looking with a laugh at the antics of the artist as he danced.

All at once she burst out laughing at something, and uttered a long cynical sentence loud enough to be heard by everyone.  Vassilyev was aghast, and not knowing how to look, gave a constrained smile.  He was the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have heard her.

“Stand me some Lafitte,” his neighbor said again.

Vassilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and walked away from her.  It seemed to him hot and stifling, and his heart began throbbing slowly but violently, like a hammer—­one! two! three!

“Let us go away!” he said, pulling the artist by his sleeve.

“Wait a little; let me finish.”

While the artist and the medical student were finishing the quadrille, to avoid looking at the women, Vassilyev scrutinized the musicians.  A respectable-looking old man in spectacles, rather like Marshal Bazaine, was playing the piano; a young man with a fair beard, dressed in the latest fashion, was playing the violin.  The young man had a face that did not look stupid nor exhausted, but intelligent, youthful, and fresh.  He was dressed fancifully and with taste; he played with feeling.  It was a mystery how he and the respectable-looking old man had come here.  How was it they were not ashamed to sit here?  What were they thinking about when they looked at the women?

If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags, looking hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could have understood their presence, perhaps.  As it was, Vassilyev could not understand it at all.  He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now.  It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed in it....

The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a loathsome sentence in a loud voice.  A feeling of disgust took possession of him.  He flushed crimson and went out of the room.

“Wait a minute, we are coming too!” the artist shouted to him.

IV

“While we were dancing,” said the medical student, as they all three went out into the street, “I had a conversation with my partner.  We talked about her first romance.  He, the hero, was an accountant at Smolensk with a wife and five children.  She was seventeen, and she lived with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles.”

“How did he win her heart?” asked Vassilyev.