“Now you just listen to my story, nunky, will you? Well, we used to get drunk all the time with Philka. One day when I was abed, mother comes and says:
“‘What d’ye mean by lying in bed, you hound, you thief!’ She abused me for some time, then she said, ‘Marry Akoulka. They’ll be glad to give her to you, and they’ll give three hundred roubles with her.’
“‘But,’ says I, ‘all the world knows that she’s a bad girl——’
“‘Hist, the marriage ceremony cures all that; besides, she’ll always be in fear of her life from you, so you’ll be in clover together. Their money would make us comfortable; I’ve spoken about the marriage already to Marie Stépanovna, we’re of one mind about it.’
“So I say, ‘Let’s have twenty roubles down on the spot, and I’ll have her.’
“Well, you needn’t believe it unless you please, but I was drunk right up to the wedding-day. Then Philka Marosof kept threatening me all the time.
“‘I’ll break every bone in your body, a nice fellow you to be engaged, and to Akoulka; if I like I’ll sleep every blessed night with her when she’s your wife.’
“‘You’re a hound, and a liar,’ that’s what I said to him. But he insulted me so in the street, before everybody, that I ran to Aukoudim’s and said, ‘I won’t marry her unless I have fifty roubles down this moment.’”
“And they really did give her to you in marriage?”
“Me? Why not, I should like to know? We were respectable people enough. Father had been ruined by a fire a little before he died; he had been a richer man than Aukoudim Trophimtych.