into the front hall, the first to recognize
him was the round-eyed Verka, dressed in her usual jockey costume. She
began to twirl round and round, to clap her palms, and called out:

"Jennka, Jennka, come quicker, your little lover has come to you ...
The little cadet ... And what a handsome little fellow!"

But Jennka was not in the drawing room at this time; a stout
head-conductor had already managed to get hold of her.

This elderly, sedate, and majestic man was a very convenient guest,
because he never lingered in the house for more than twenty minutes,
fearing to let his train go by; and, even so, glanced at his watch all
the while. During this time he regularly drank down four bottles of
beer, and, going away, infallibly gave the girl half a rouble for candy
and Simeon twenty kopecks for drink-money.

Kolya Gladishev was not alone, but with a comrade of the same school,
Petrov, who was stepping over the threshold of a brothel for the first
time, having given in to the tempting persuasions of Gladishev.
Probably, during these minutes, he found himself in the same wild,
absurd, feverish state which Kolya himself had gone through a year and
a half ago, when his legs had shook, his mouth had grown dry, and the
lights of the lamps had danced before him in revolving wheels.

Simeon took their great-coats from them and hid them separately, on the
side, that the shoulder straps and the buttons might not be seen.

It must be said, that this stern man, who did not approve of students
because of their free-and-easy facetiousness and incomprehensible style
in conversation, also did not like when just such boys in uniform
appeared in the establishment.

"Well, what's the good of it?" he would at times say sombrely to his
colleagues by profession. "What if a whippersnapper like that comes,
and runs right up nose to nose against his superiors? Smash, and
they've closed up the establishment! There, like Lupendikha's three
years back. Of course, it's nothing that they closed it up--she
transferred it in another name right off; and when they sentenced her
to sit in jail for a year and a half, why, it came to a pre-etty penny
for her. She had to shell out four hundred for Kerbesh alone ... And
then it also happens: a little pig of that kind will cook up some sort
of disease for himself and start in whining: 'Oh, papa! Oh, mamma! I am
dying!' 'Tell me, you skunk, where you got it?' 'There and there ...'
Well, and so they haul