After six months, from behind a
door, he was the witness--or more correctly the auditor--of an
outrageous scene. The wife of the general, always so respectable
and restrained, was yelling in her boudoir at signorita Anita, and
cursing in the words of a cab-driver: the signorita was in the
fifth month of pregnancy. If she had not cried, then, probably,
they would simply have given her smart-money, and she would have
gone away in peace; but she was in love with the young master, did
not demand anything, and for that reason they drove her away with
the aid of the police.
In the fifth or sixth class many of Kolya's comrades had already
tasted of the tree of knowledge of evil. At that time it was
considered in their corpus an especial, boastful masculine chic to
call all secret things by their own names. Arkasha Shkar
contracted a disease, not dangerous, but still venereal; and he
became for three whole months the object of worship of all the
seniors--at that time there were no squads yet. And many of them
visited brothels; and, really, about their sprees they spoke far
more handsomely and broadly than the hussars of the time of Denis
Davidov.
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