And She was the cause of all this—She! “Oh, the Dev——! No, I won’t. Perhaps she could not get away, or she is ill, or dead. She’s dead!”—and I swore.
II
“Eugenia Nikolaevna will be there to-night,” one of my companions, a student, remarked to me, without the slightest arrière pensée. He could not know how that I had waited for her in the frost from seven to half-past eight.
“Indeed,” I replied, as in deep thought, but within my soul there leapt out: “Oh, the Dev——!” “There” meant at the Polozovs’ evening party. Now the Polozovs were people with whom I was not upon visiting terms. But this evening I would be there.
“You fellows!” I shouted cheerfully, “to-day is Christmas Day, when everybody enjoys himself. Let us do so too.”
“But how?” one of them mournfully replied.
“And where?” continued another.
“We will dress up, and go round to all the evening parties,” I decided.
And these insensate individuals actually became cheerful. They shouted, leapt, and sang. They thanked me for my suggestion, and counted up the amount of “the ready” available. In the course of half an hour we had collected all the lonely, disconsolate students in town; and when we had recruited a cheerful dozen or so of leaping devils, we repaired to a hair-dresser’s—he was also a costumier—and let in there the cold, and youth, and laughter.
I wanted something sombre and handsome, with a shade of elegant sadness; so I requested: