his two fingers like two horns on his bald forehead and went off into a low, prolonged chuckle. He sat like that, chuckling, for a full half-minute, staring into Velchaninov's face in a frenzy of malignant insolence. The latter was petrified as though at the sight of some ghost. But his stupefaction lasted but one brief instant; a sarcastic and insolently composed smile came slowly upon his lips.
"What's the meaning of that?" he asked, carelessly drawling the words.
"The meaning of it is—horns!" Pavel Pavlovitch rapped out, taking away his fingers from his forehead at last.
"That is . . . your horns?"
"My own, generously bestowed!" Pavel Pavlovitch said with a very nasty grimace. Both were silent.
"You're a plucky fellow, I must say!" Velchaninov pronounced.
"Because I showed you my decorations? Do you know, Alexey Ivanovitch, you'd better offer me something! You know I entertained you every blessed day for a whole year at T——— Send for just one bottle, my throat is dry."
"With pleasure; you should have said so before. What will you have?"
"Why you? Say we; we'll drink together, won't we?" said Pavel Pavlovitch, gazing into his face with a challenging, but at the same time strangely uneasy look.
"Champagne?"
"What else? It's not the time for vodka yet. . . ."
Velchaninov got up deliberately, rang for Mavra and gave instructions.
"To the joy of our delightful meeting after nine years' absence,: said Pavel Pavlovitch, with a quite superfluous and inappropriate snigger. "Now you, and you only, are the one friend left me! Stepan Mihalovitch Bagautov is no more! As the poet says—
"Great Patroclus is no more,
Vile Thersites still lives on!"
And at the word "Thersites" he poked himself in the chest.
"You’d better hurry up and speak out, you swine; I don't like hints," Velchaninov thought to himself. His anger was rising and for a long time he had hardly been able to restrain himself.
