“By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her.  What next!”

“So he knew how to get his partner’s story out of her,” thought Vassilyev about the medical student.  “But I don’t know how to.”

“I say, I am going home!” he said.

“What for?”

“Because I don’t know how to behave here.  Besides, I am bored, disgusted.  What is there amusing in it?  If they were human beings—­but they are savages and animals.  I am going; do as you like.”

“Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling...” said the artist in a tearful voice, hugging Vassilyev, “come along!  Let’s go to one more together and damnation take them!...  Please do, Grisha!”

They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase.  In the carpet and the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.

“I really will go home!” said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.

“Come, come, dear boy,” said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck.  “Don’t be tiresome....  Gri-gri, be a good comrade!  We came together, we will go back together.  What a beast you are, really!”

“I can wait for you in the street.  I think it’s loathsome, really!”

“Come, come, Grisha....  If it is loathsome, you can observe it!  Do you understand?  You can observe!”

“One must take an objective view of things,” said the medical student gravely.

Vassilyev went into the drawing-room and sat down.  There were a number of visitors in the room besides him and his friends:  two infantry officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who looked like an actor.  All the young ladies were taken up with these visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.

Only one of them, dressed a la Aida, glanced sideways at him, smiled, and said, yawning:  “A dark one has come....”

Vassilyev’s heart was throbbing and his face burned.  He felt ashamed before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and miserable.  He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and felt nothing but repulsion towards them.  He felt pity neither for the women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.

“It is because I am not trying to understand them,” he thought.  “They are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are human beings all the same, they have souls.  One must understand them and then judge....”

“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us,” the artist shouted to him and disappeared.

The medical student disappeared soon after.

“Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn’t be like this....”  Vassilyev went on thinking.