“Goodbye, goodbye, come again. Don’t be on ceremony,” Fomishka and Fimishka exclaimed together. Then Fomishka suddenly drawled out:
“Many, many, many years of life. Many—”
“Many, many,” Kalliopitch chimed in quite unexpectedly, when opening the door for the young men to pass out.
The whole four suddenly found themselves in the street before the squat little house, while Pufka’s voice was heard from within:
“You fools!” she cried. “You fools!”
Paklin laughed aloud, but no one responded.
Markelov looked at each in turn, as though he expected to hear some expression of indignation. Solomin alone smiled his habitual smile.
XX
“Well,” Paklin was the first to begin, “we have been to the eighteenth century, now let us fly to the twentieth! Golushkin is such a go-ahead man that one can hardly count him as belonging to the nineteenth.”
“Why, do you know him?”