a mouth that stood awkwardly open, as though it had come unbuttoned,
and a scraggy neck that recalled the handle of a bass-viol. I went up
to her, and, with a perfunctory scrape of my heels, invited her to the
dance. She was wearing a dress of faded rosebud pink, not full-blown
rose colour; on her head quivered a striped and dejected beetle of some
sort on a thick bronze pin; and altogether this lady was, if one may so
express it, soaked through and through with a sort of sour ennui and
inveterate lack of success. From the very commencement of the evening
she had not once stirred from her seat; no one had thought of asking
her to dance. One flaxen-headed youth of sixteen had, through lack of a
partner, been on the point of addressing this lady, and had taken a
step in her direction, but had thought better of it, stared at her, and
hurriedly dived into the crowd. You can fancy with what joyful
amazement she agreed to my proposal! I led her in triumph right across
the ballroom, picked out two chairs, and sat down with her in the ring
of the mazurka, among ten couples, almost opposite the prince, who had,
of course, been offered the first place. The prince, as I have said
already, was dancing with Liza. Neither I nor my partner was disturbed
by invitations; consequently, we had plenty of time for conversation.
To tell the truth, my partner was not conspicuous for her capacity for
the utterance of words in consecutive speech; she used her mouth
principally for the achievement of a strange downward smile such as I
had never till then beheld; while she raised her eyes upward, as though
some unseen force were pulling her face in two. But I did not feel her
lack of eloquence. Happily I felt full of wrath, and my partner did not
make me shy. I fell to finding fault with everything and every one in
the world, with especial emphasis on town-bred youngsters and
Petersburg dandies; and went to such lengths at last, that my partner
gradually ceased smiling, and instead of turning her eyes upward, began
suddenly--from astonishment, I suppose--to squint, and that so