ion,
he worked his legs with gravity and feeling, and so crooked his
knees that he looked like a jack-a-dandy pulled by strings, while
Anna Pavlovna, pale and thrilled, bending her figure languidly and
turning her eyes up, tried to look as though she scarcely touched
the floor, and evidently felt herself that she was not on earth,
not at the local club, but somewhere far, far away--in the clouds.
Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of beatitude
. . . . The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire
to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had
forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she
fancied now in her excitement. . . .

"You wait; I'll teach you to smile so blissfully," he muttered.
"You are not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old
fright ought to realise she is a fright!"

Petty feelings of envy, vexation, wounded vanity, of that small,
provincial misanthropy engendered in petty officials by vodka and
a sedentary life, swarmed in his heart like mice. Waiting for the
end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife.
Anna Pavlovna was sitting with her partner, and, flirting her fan
and coquettishly dropping her eyelids, was describing how she used
to dance in Petersburg (her lips were pursed up like a rosebud, and
she pronounced "at home in Puetuersburg").

"Anyuta, let us go home," croaked the tax-collector.

Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as
though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed
all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly-looking,
ill-humoured, ordinary husband.

"Let us go home," repeated the tax-collector.

"Why? It's quite early!"

"I beg you to come home!" said the tax-collector deliberately, with
a spiteful expression.

"Why? Has anything happened?" Anna Pavlovna asked in a flutter.

"Nothing has happened, but I wish you to go home at once. . . . I
wish it; that's enough, and without further talk, please."

Anna Pavlovna was not afraid of her husband, but she felt ashamed
on account of her partner, who was looking at her husband with
surprise and amusement. She got up and moved a little apart with
her husband.

"What notion is this?" she began. "Why go home? Why, it's not eleven
o'clock."

"I wish it, and that's enough. Come along, and that's all about
it."

"Don't be silly! Go home alone if you want to."

"All ri