Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/281

Rh mortal immediately passes it on to another, if only to say: 'Just think what lies people are putting about!' And the other mortal listens eagerly, though he too will say afterwards: 'Yes, that's a perfectly silly lie, not worth noticing!' And thereupon he sets off to look for a third mortal, in order that after telling the story he may exclaim with righteous indignation: 'What a silly lie!' And it will certainly go the round of the whole town and all the inhabitants, every one of them, will discuss it till they are sick of it, and will then admit that it's not worth noticing and too silly to think of.

This apparently nonsensical incident unmistakably upset our hero. However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to upset a sensible man. He began to feel uncomfortable and ill at ease, exactly as though with highly polished boots he had stepped into a filthy, stinking puddle—in short, it was nasty, very nasty. He tried not to think of it, he tried to turn the current of his thoughts, to distract his mind, and sat down to whist, but everything went awry like a crooked wheel: twice he revoked, and forgetting that one should not trump in the third place, threw away his whole hand and spoilt his game by his foolishness. The president simply could not understand how Pavel Ivanovitch, who had such a good and, one might say, subtle understanding of the game, could make such blunders and had even trumped his king of spades, in whom, to use his own expression, he had