with the arrangement of this
benefit performance in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers
some clean-shaven haughty visage, but ... What shall it be, gentlemen?"

Lichonin answered good-naturedly:

"Why, drag him here. Perhaps he's funny."

"And you?" the sub-professor turned to Platonov.

"It's all the same to me. I know him slightly. At first he'll shout:
'KELLNER, champagne!' then burst into tears about his wife, who is an
angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise a row over the
bill, but none too loudly. All in all he's entertaining."

"Let him come," said Volodya, from behind the shoulder of Katie, who
was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs.

"And you, Veltman?"

"What?" the student came to with a start. He was sitting on the divan
with his back to his companions, near the reclining Pasha, bending over
her, and already for a long time, with the friendliest appearance of
sympathy, had been stroking her, now on the shoulder, now on the hair
at the nape of the neck, while she was smiling at him with her shyly
shameless and senselessly passionate smile through half-closed and
trembling eyelashes. "What? What's it all about? Oh yes,--is it all
right to let the actor in? I've nothing against it. Please do ..."

Yarchenko sent an invitation through Simeon, and the actor came and
immediately commenced the usual actor's play. In the door he paused, in
his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with a glistening
opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle of his chest, like
an actor portraying in the theatre an elderly worldly lion or a bank
director. And approximately these persons he was inwardly picturing to
himself.

"May I be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate company?"
he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow done somewhat to
one side.

They asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. Shaking hands, he
stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that the hand proved
to be far lower. Now it was no longer a bank director, but such a
clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a rake of the golden youths.
But his face--with rumpled, wild eyebrows and with denuded lids without
lashes--was the vulgar, harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic,
libertine, and pettily cruel man. Together with him came two of his
ladies: Henrietta the eldest girl in years in the establishment of Anna
Markovna, experienced, who had seen everything