/$ "A beetle black, and on his crown Nice curly hair, with whiskers smart, His eyebrows colored a dark-brown, The picture of my own sweetheart." $/ Being the happy possessor of such looks he thought he had the right to be aggressive, all the more so as Lubinka explicitly promised him her cooperation. Lubinka, apparently, had burned all her bridges, and her reputation was by no means a pleasant topic in her sister's ears. Every night, it was said, a merry band caroused in her rooms from midnight till morning, Lubinka presiding and appearing as a "gypsy," half naked (at this, Lyulkin, addressing his intoxicated friends, would cry out, "Look, there's a breast!") and with loosened hair. She would sing to the accompaniment of a guitar: /$ "How I did love it with my mash, Who had the darlingest mustache!" $/ Anninka listened to the stories about her sister and became greatly worried. What surprised her most was that Lubinka sang the ditty about the "mash who had the darlingest mustache" in a gypsy-like manner, just like the celebrated Matryusha of Moscow. Anninka always gave her sister due credit, and had she been told that Lubinka sang couplets from _Old-time Colonels_ with unsurpassed excellence, she would have considered it quite natural and would have readily believed it. The theatergoers of Kursk, Tambov and Penza had not yet forgotten with what inimitable naïveté Lubinka sang the most atrocious ambiguities in her soft little voice. But that Lubinka could sing like a gypsy--pardon me! A lie! She, Anninka, could sing like that, no doubt of it. It was her genre, her business, and everyone in Kursk who had seen her in the play, _Russian Romances Personified,_ would willingly testify to it. Anninka would take the guitar, sling the striped sash over her shoulder, sit down on a chair, cross her legs and begin: "I-ekh! I-akh!" It was the very manner of Matryusha the gypsy. However that may have been, one thing was certain, that Lubinka was extravagant. And Lyulkin, for fear of introducing a discordant note into the drunken bliss, had already resorted to borrowing from the zemstvo treasury. Not to speak of the tremendous amount of champagne which was both consumed and poured out on the floor in Lubinka's quarters, all sorts of things had to be provided to feed her growing capriciousness and extravagance. First it was dresses from Mme. Minangois of Moscow, then jewelry from Fuld. Lubinka was rather thrifty and did not scorn valuables. Her licentiousness by no means interfered with her love of gold, diamonds and especially lottery bonds. At any rate, it was a life not of gaiety, but of boisterous debauchery and continuous intoxication.