AN hour after the boys were gone Eugene Mihailovich, the owner of the
shop, came home, and began to count his receipts.
“Oh, you clumsy fool! Idiot that you are!” he shouted, addressing his
wife, after having seen the coupon and noticed the forgery.
“But I have often seen you, Eugene, accepting coupons in payment, and
precisely twelve rouble ones,” retorted his wife, very humiliated,
grieved, and all but bursting into tears. “I really don’t know how they
contrived to cheat me,” she went on. “They were pupils of the school,
in uniform. One of them was quite a handsome boy, and looked so comme il
faut.”
“A comme il faut fool, that is what you are!” The husband went on
scolding her, while he counted the cash. . . . When I accept coupons, I
see what is written on them. And you probably looked only at the boys’
pretty faces. “You had better behave yourself in your old age.”
His wife could not stand this, and got into a fury.
“That is just like you men! Blaming everybody around you. But when it is
you who lose fifty-four roubles at cards--that is of no consequence in
your eyes.”
“That is a different matter
“I don’t want to talk to you,” said his wife, and went to her room.
There she began to remind herself that her family was opposed to her
marriage, thinking her present husband far below her in social rank, and
that it was she who insisted on marrying him. Then she went on thinking
of the child she had lost, and how indifferent her husband had been to
their loss. She hated him so intensely at that moment that she wished
for his death. Her wish frightened her, however, and she hurriedly began
to dress and left the house. When her husband came from the shop to the
inner rooms of their flat she was gone. Without waiting for him she had
dressed and gone off to friends--a teacher of French in the school, a
Russified Pole, and his wife--who had invited her and her husband to a
party in their house that evening.
V
THE guests at the party had tea and cakes offered to them, and sat down
after that to play whist at a number of card-tables.
The partners of Eugene Mihailovich’s wife were the host himself, an
officer, and an old and very stupid lady in a wig, a widow who owned a
music-shop; she loved playing cards and played remarkably well. But it
was Eugene Mihailovich’s wife who was the winner all the time. The best
cards were continually in her hands. At her side she had a plate with
grapes and a pear and was in the best of spirits.
“And Eugene Mihailovich? Why is he so late?” asked the hostess, who
played at another table.
“Probably busy settling accounts,” said Eugene Mihailovich’s wife. “He
has to pay off the tradesmen, to get in firewood.” The quarrel she had
with her husband revived in her memory; she frowned, and her hands, from
which she had not taken off the mittens, shook with fury against him.
“Oh, there he is.--We have just been speaking of you,” said the hostess
to Eugene Mihailovich, who came in at that very moment. “Why are you so
late?”
“I was busy,” answered Eugene Mihailovich, in a gay voice, rubbing his
hands. And to his wife’s surprise he came to her side and said,--“You
know, I managed to get rid of the coupon.”
“No! You don’t say so!”
“Yes, I used it to pay for a cartload of firewood I bought from a
peasant.”
And Eugene Mihailovich related with great indignation to the company
present--his wife adding more details to his narrative--how his wife had
been cheated by two unscrupulous schoolboys.
“Well, and now let us sit down to work,” he said, taking his place at
one of the whist-tables when his turn came, and beginning to shuffle the
cards.