Bitska in a bowler-hat, red-faced, with thin whiskers such as are
worn by the Letts, looked gravely round:
"You have not slept, Robert Edouardovitch?" asked Agrenev.
"No, I have not, and I am not in a good humour either." The man was
silent a moment, then burst out; "Now I am forty years, and my vife
she is eighteen. I am in vants of an earnest housekeeper. But my
vife, she is always jesting and dragging me by the--how do you call
it--the beard! And laughing and larking...." His little narrow eyes
wrinkled up into a wry smile: "Ah, the larking vench!"
THE WOLF'S RAVINE
In childhood, as a small lad, Alexander Alexandrovitch Agrenev had
heard from listening to his mother's conversation how--lo and behold!
one morning at 9 o'clock Nina Kallistratovna Zamotkina had proceeded
with her daughter to Doctor Chasovnikov's flat, in order to deliver a
slap in the face to his wife for having broken up the family hearth
by a liaison with Paul Alexander Zamotkin, Nina Kallistratovna's
husband.
The child Agrenev had vividly pictured to himself how Nina
Kallistratovna had walked, holding her daughter with one hand, an
attache-case in the other: of course her bearing must have been
singular, as she was going to the flat to administer a slap in the
face; no doubt she had walked either in a squatting or a bandy-legged
fashion.
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