One would have said that he was a relative or a god-brother to them.
Turbin kissed all the young gypsy girls on the lips; the old women and the men kissed him on the shoulder or on the hand.
The gentlemen were also very glad of the count's arrival; the more because the festivity, having passed its apogee, was now becoming tame; every one began to feel a sense of satiety. The wine, having lost its exhilarating effect on the nerves, only served to load the stomach. Everybody had discharged the last cannon of his wildness, and was looking around moodily. All the songs had been sung, and ran in the heads of each, leaving a mere impression of noise and confusion.
Whatever any one did that was strange and wild, the rest began to look upon it as nothing very entertaining or amusing.
The isprávnik stretched out on the floor in shameless fashion at the feet of some old woman, kicked his leg in the air, and began to cry,—
"Champagne!... The count has come!... Champagne!... He has come!... Now give us champagne!... I will make a bath of champagne, and swim in it! Gentlemen of the nobility, I love your admirable society!... Stioshka, sing 'The Narrow Road.'"
The cavalryman was also very gay, but in a different fashion. He was sitting in a corner of a sofa with a tall, handsome gypsy, Liubasha; and with the consciousness that intoxication was beginning to cloud his eyes, he kept blinking them, and swinging his head, and repeating the same words over and over again: he was proposing in a whisper to the gypsy to fly with him somewhere.
Liubasha, smiling, listened to him as though what he said were very amusing to her, and at the same time rather melancholy. Occasionally she cast her glances at her husband, the squint-eyed Sashka, who was standing behind a chair near her. In reply to the cavalryman's declaration of love, she bent over to his ear, and begged him to buy her some perfume and a ribbon without any one knowing it, so that the others should not see it.
"Hurrah!" cried the cavalryman when the count came in.
The handsome young man, with an expression of anxiety, was walking up and down the room with solicitously steady steps, and humming an air from the "Revolt in the Seraglio."