man with the foxy face who had come in with a message in the morning, and whom Golushkin addressed as Vasya, his clerk. 'He's not much of a talker', Golushkin declared, pointing to him with all five fingers at once, 'but devoted heart and soul to our cause.' Vasya confined himself to bowing, blushing, blinking, and smirking so effectually, that again it was impossible to say whether he was a vulgar blockhead or a consummate knave and scoundrel.
'But to dinner, gentlemen, to dinner.'
After partaking freely of the preliminary appetisers on the sideboard, they sat down to the table. Immediately after the soup, Golushkin ordered up the champagne. In frozen flakes and lumps it dropped from the neck of the bottle into the glasses. 'To our . . . our enterprise!' cried Golushkin, with a wink and a nod in the direction of the servants, as though to give them to understand that in the presence of outsiders they must be on their guard! The proselyte Vasya still continued silent, and though he sat on the extreme edge of his chair and conducted himself in general with a servility utterly out of keeping with the convictions to which, in the words of his patron, he was devoted heart and soul, he drank away at the wine with desperate eagerness! . . . The others, however, talked; that is to say, their
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