“Never mind.  Don’t pay any attention,” answered the other aloud.  “But let’s get out of here, however.  I’ll tell you everything right away.  Excuse me, Liubochka, it’s only for a minute.  I’ll come back at once, fix you up, and then evaporate, like smoke.”

“But don’t trouble yourself,” replied Liubka:  “it’ll be all right for me here, right on this divan.  And you fix yourself up on the bed.”

“No, that’s no longer like a model, my angel!  I have a colleague here.  And so I’ll go to him to sleep.  I’ll return in just a minute.”

Both students went out into the corridor.

“What meaneth this dream?” asked Nijeradze, opening wide his oriental, somewhat sheepish eyes.  “Whence this beauteous child, this comrade in a petticoat?”

Lichonin shook his head with great significance and made a wry face.  Now, when the ride, the fresh air, the morning, and the business-like, everyday, accustomed setting had entirely sobered him, he was beginning to experience within his soul an indistinct feeling of a certain awkwardness, needlessness of this sudden action; and at the same time something in the nature of an unconscious irritation both against himself and the woman he had carried off.  He already had a presentiment of the onerousness of living together, of a multiplicity of cares, unpleasantnesses and expenses; of the equivocal smiles or even simply the unceremonious questionings of comrades; finally, of the serious hindrance during the time of government examinations.  But, having scarcely begun speaking with Nijeradze, he at once became ashamed of his pusillanimity, and having started off listlessly, towards the end he again began to prance on his heroic steed.

“Do you see, prince,” he said, in his confusion twisting a button of his comrade’s coat and without looking in his eyes, “you’ve made a mistake.  This isn’t a comrade in a petticoat, but ... simply, I was just now with my colleagues ... that is, I wasn’t, but just dropped in for a minute with my friends into the Yamkas, to Anna Markovna ...”

“With whom?” asked Nijeradze, becoming animated.

“Well, isn’t it all the same to you, prince?  There was Tolpygin, Ramses, a certain sub-professor—­Yarchenko—­Borya Sobashnikov, and others ...  I don’t recall.  We had been boat-riding the whole evening, then dived into a publican’s, and only after that, like swine, started for the Yamkas.  I, you know, am a very abstemious man.  I only sat and soaked up cognac, like a sponge, with a certain reporter I know.  Well, all the others fell from grace however.  And so, toward morning, for some reason or other, I went all to pieces.  I got so sad and full of pity from looking at these unhappy women.  I also thought, now, of how our sisters enjoy our regard, love, protection; how our mothers are surrounded with reverent adoration.  Just let some one say one rude word to them, shove them, offend them; we are ready to chew his throat off!  Isn’t that the truth?”