“There’s nobody there at all,” he said. “It was your fancy, you queer creature. . . . You can sleep easy, your fool of a Pelagea is as virtuous as her mistress. What a coward you are! What a . . . .”
And the deputy procurator began teasing his wife. He was wide awake now and did not want to go to sleep again.
“You are a coward!” he laughed. “You’d better go to the doctor to-morrow and tell him about your hallucinations. You are a neurotic!”
“What a smell of tar,” said his wife—“tar or something . . . onion . . . cabbage soup!”
“Y-yes! There is a smell . . . I am not sleepy. I say, I’ll light the candle. . . . Where are the matches? And, by the way, I’ll show you the photograph of the procurator of the Palace of Justice. He gave us all a photograph when he said good-bye to us yesterday, with his autograph.”
Gagin struck a match against the wall and lighted a candle. But before he had moved a step from the bed to fetch the photographs he heard behind him a piercing, heartrending shriek. Looking round, he saw his wife’s large eyes fastened upon him, full of amazement, horror, and wrath. . . .
“You took your dressing-gown off in the kitchen?” she said, turning pale.
“Why?”
“Look at yourself!”
The deputy procurator looked down at himself, and gasped.