head: the boots were not there.

"Where can they be, the damned things?" Semyon brought out. "I fancy
I cleaned them in the evening and put them here. . . . H'm! . . .
Yesterday, I must own, I had a drop. . . . I must have put them in
another room, I suppose. That must be it, Afanasy Yegoritch, they
are in another room! There are lots of boots, and how the devil is
one to know them apart when one is drunk and does not know what one
is doing? . . . I must have taken them in to the lady that's next
door . . . the actress. . . ."

"And now, if you please, I am to go in to a lady and disturb her
all through you! Here, if you please, through this foolishness I
am to wake up a respectable woman."

Sighing and coughing, Murkin went to the door of the next room and
cautiously tapped.

"Who's there?" he heard a woman's voice a minute later.

"It's I!" Murkin began in a plaintive voice, standing in the attitude
of a cavalier addressing a lady of the highest society. "Pardon my
disturbing you, madam, but I am a man in delicate health, rheumatic
. . . . The doctors, madam, have ordered me to keep my feet warm,
especially as I have to go at once to tune the piano at Madame la
Générale Shevelitsyn's. I can't go to her barefoot."

"But what do you want? What piano?"

"Not a piano, madam; it is in reference to boots! Semyon, stupid