Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/311

Rh leading lady in the town, as a lady in fact quite unsuspicious of anything of the sort, she was deeply wounded by this tittle-tattle, and was moved to an indignation which was, indeed, perfectly justified. The poor schoolgirl had to endure one of the most unpleasant interviews to which a girl of sixteen has ever been exposed. A perfect torrent of questions, inquiries, upbraidings, threats, reproaches, admonitions were poured out, so that the girl burst into tears, sobbed, and could not understand a word. The porter received the strictest orders never on any pretext or under any circumstances to admit Tchitchikov.

Having done their duty by the governor's wife, the ladies attacked the men's party, trying to bring them over to their side, and maintaining that the dead souls were a mere pretext only made up to avert suspicion and to enable the elopement to be carried out more successfully. Many of the men were brought over and joined the ladies' party, although they were exposed to severe censure from their fellows, who called them old women and petticoats—names, as we all know, most insulting to the male sex.

But in spite of the defence and resistance put up by the men, there was by no means the same discipline in their party as in the women's. With them everything was crude, unpolished, inharmonious, untidy and poor; there was a discordance, a chaos, an incoherence, a muddle in their thoughts—in fact it exemplified the worthless