"Well, I did come, Anna Fedorovna, but you weren't at home, and I left the very best comfits for you," said the young man, in a voice that was very thin, considering his height.
"You always are provided with excuses; I don't need your comfits. Please do not think"....
"I begin to see, Anna Fedorovna, how you have changed toward me, and I know why. But it is not right," he added, but without finishing his remark, evidently owing to some powerful interior emotion, which caused his lips to tremble strangely.
Anna Fedorovna did not heed him, and continued to follow Turbin with her eyes. The marshal, at whose house the ball was given,--a big, stout old man, who had lost his teeth,--came up to the count, and, taking him by the arm, invited him into his library to smoke and drink if he so desired.
As soon as Turbin disappeared, Anna Fedorovna felt that there was absolutely nothing for her to do in the ballroom, and slipping her hand through the arm of a dried-up old maid, who was a friend of hers, went with her into the dressing-room.
"Well, what do you think of him? Is he nice?" asked the old maid.
"Only it's terrible--the way he follows you up!" said Anna Fedorovna, going to the mirror, and contemplating herself in it.
Her face was aglow, her eyes were full of mischief, her color was heightened; then suddenly imitating one of the ballet-dancers whom she had seen during election time, she pirouetted round on one toe, and, laughing her guttural but sweet laugh, she leaped up in the air, crossing her knees.
"What a man he is! he even asked me for a _souvenir_," she confided to her friend. "But he will ne-e-ver get one," she said, singing the last words, and lifting one finger in the lilac-colored glove that reached to her elbow.
In the library where Turbin was conducted by the marshal, stood various kinds of vodka, liqueurs, edibles,[65] and champagne. In a cloud of tobacco-smoke the nobility were sitting, or walking up and down, talking about the elections.
"When the whole of the high nobility of our district has honored him with an election," exclaimed the newly elected isprávnik who was already tolerably tipsy, "he certainly ought not to fail in his duties toward society in general."