“That’s a nice lie!” interposed a pock-marked lad with white eyelashes, a red cravat, and ragged elbows. “You went off with a passport sharp enough, but never a halfpenny of rent did the masters see from you, and you never earned a farthing for yourself; you just managed to crawl home again, and you’ve never had a new rag on you since.”
“Ah, well, what could one do, Konstantin Narkizitch?” responded Kuprya; “a man falls in love—a man’s ruined and done for! You go through what I have, Konstantin Narkizitch, before you blame me!”
“And you picked out a nice one to fall in love with!—a regular fright.”
“No, you mustn’t say that, Konstantin Narkizitch.”
“Who’s going to believe that? I’ve seen her, you know; I saw her with my own eyes last year in Moscow.”
“Last year she had gone off a little, certainly,” observed Kuprya.
“No, gentlemen, I tell you what,” a tall, thin man, with a face spotted with pimples, a valet probably, from his frizzed and pomatumed head, remarked in a careless and disdainful voice; “let Kuprya Afanasyitch sing us his song. Come on, now; begin, Kuprya Afanasyitch.”
“Yes! yes!” put in the others. “Hoorah for Alexandra! That’s one for Kuprya; ‘pon my soul.—Sing away, Kuprya!—You’re a regular brick, Alexandra!” (Serfs often use feminine terminations in referring to a man as an expression of endearment.) “Sing away!”
“This is not the place to sing,” Kuprya replied firmly; “this is the manor counting-house.”
“And what’s that to do with you? you’ve got your eye on a place as clerk, eh?” answered Konstantin with a coarse laugh. “That’s what it is!”