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The tax-collector watched, scowling with spite. . . .

It was not jealousy he was feeling. He was ill-humoured–first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully. But what above everything revolted him and moved him to indignation was the expression of happiness on his wife’s face.

“It makes me sick to look at her!” he muttered. “Going on for forty, and nothing to boast of at any time, and she must powder her face and lace herself up! And frizzing her hair! Flirting and making faces, and fancying she’s doing the thing in style! Ugh! you’re a pretty figure, upon my soul!”

Anna Pavlovna was so lost in the dance that she did not once glance at her husband.

“Of course not! Where do we poor country bumpkins come in!” sneered the tax-collector.

“We are at a discount now. . . . We’re clumsy seals, unpolished provincial bears, and she’s the queen of the ball! She has kept enough of her looks to please even officers. . . They’d not object to making love to her, I dare say!”

During the mazurka the tax-collector’s face twitched with spite. A black-haired officer with prominent eyes and Tartar cheekbones danced the mazurka with Anna Pavlovna. Assuming a stern expression, he worked his legs with gravity and feeling, and so crooked his knees that he looked like a jack-a-dandy pulled by strings, while Anna Pavlovna, pale and thrilled, bending her figure languidly and turning her eyes up, tried to look as though she scarcely touched the floor, and evidently felt herself that she was not on earth, not at the local club, but somewhere far, far away–in the clouds. Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of beatitude . . . . The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement. . . .

“You wait; I’ll teach you to smile so blissfully,” he muttered. “You are not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old fright ought to realise she is a fright!”

Petty feelings of envy, vexation, wounded vanity, of that small, provincial misanthropy engendered in petty officials by vodka and a sedentary life, swarmed in his heart like mice. Waiting for the end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife. Anna Pavlovna was sitting with her partner, and, flirting her fan and coquettishly dropping her eyelids, was describing how she used to dance in Petersburg (her lips were pursed up like a rosebud, and she pronounced “at home in Puetuersburg”).

“Anyuta, let us go home,” croaked the tax-collector.

Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly-looking, ill-humoured, ordinary husband.

“Let us go home,” repeated the tax-collector.

“Why? It’s quite early!”

“I beg you to come home!” said the tax-collector deliberately, with a spiteful expression.

“Why? Has anything happened?” Anna Pavlovna asked in a flutter.

“Nothing has happened, but I wish you to go home at once. . . . I wish it; that’s enough, and without further talk, please.”

Anna Pavlovna was not afraid of her husband, but she felt ashamed on account of her partner, who was looking at her husband with surprise and amusement. She got up and moved a little apart with her husband.

“What notion is this?” she began. “Why go home? Why, it’s not eleven o’clock.”

“I wish it, and that’s enough. Come along, and that’s all about it.”

“Don’t be silly! Go home alone if you want to.”