In the ballroom, the walls of which seemed to vibrate in the same rhythm
as the deafening music, two couples were dancing. Bobetinski, whose
elbows flapped like a pair of wings, pirouetted with short, quick steps
around his partner, Madame Taliman, who was dancing with the stately
composure of a stone monument. The gigantic Artschakovski of the fair
locks made the youngest of the Lykatschev girls, a little thing with
rosy cheeks, rotate round him, whereas he, leaning forward, and closely
observing his partner's hair and shoulders, moved his legs as if he were
dancing with a child. Fifteen ladies lined the walls quite deserted, and
trying to look as if they did not mind it. As, which was always the case
at these soirées, the gentlemen numbered less than a quarter of the
ladies, the prospect of a lively and enjoyable evening was not
particularly promising.
Raisa Alexandrovna, who had just opened the ball, and was, therefore,
the object of the other ladies' envy, was now dancing with the slender,
ceremonious Olisár. He held one of her hands as if it had been fixed to
his left side. She supported her chin in a languishing way against her
other hand, which rested on his right shoulder. She kept her head far
thrown back in an affected and unnatural attitude. When the dance was
over she sat purposely near Romashov, who was leaning against the
doorpost of the ladies' dressing-room. She fanned herself violently, and
looking up to Olisár, who was leaning over her, lisped in a soft
_dolcissimo_:
"Tell me, Count, tell me, please, why do I always feel so hot? Do tell
me."
Olisár made a slight bow, clicked his spurs, stroked his moustache
several times.
"Dear lady, that is a question which I don't think even Martin Sadek
could answer."
When Olisár cast a scrutinizing glance at the fair Raisa's _décolleté_
bosom, pitiable and bare as the desert itself, she began at once to
breathe quickly and deeply.
"Ah, I have always an abnormally high temperature," Raisa Alexandrovna
went on to say with a significant expression, insinuating by her smile
that her words had a double meaning. "I suffer, too, from an unusually
fiery temperament."
Olisár gave vent to a short, soft chuckle.
Romashov stood looking sideways at Raisa, thinking with disgust, "Oh,
how loathsome she is." And at the thought that he had once enjoyed her
favours, he experienced the sensation as if he had not changed his linen
for months.
"Well, well, Count, don't laugh. Perhaps you do not know that my mother
was a Greek?"
"And how horribly she speaks, too," thought Romashov. "Curious that I
never noticed this before. It sounds as if she had a chronic cold or a
polypus in her nose--'by buther was a Greek.'"
Now Raisa turned to Romashov and threw him a challenging glance.