It ended in Kupfer taking him, on the following day, to the Princess's evening assembly. But Aratoff did not remain there long. In the first place, he found at her house about twenty guests, men and women, who were, presumably, sympathetic, but who were strangers to him, nevertheless; and this embarrassed him, although he was obliged to talk very little: but he feared this most of all. In the second place, he did not like the hostess herself, although she welcomed him very cordially and unaffectedly. Everything about her displeased him; her painted face, and her churned-up curls, and her hoarsely-mellifluous voice, her shrill laugh, her way of rolling up her eyes, her too _decollete_ bodice--and those plump, shiny fingers with a multitude of rings!... Slinking off into a corner, he now swiftly ran his eyes over the faces of all the guests, as though he did not even distinguish one from another; again he stared persistently at his own feet. But when, at last, an artist who had just come to town, with a drink-sodden countenance, extremely long hair, and a bit of glass under his puckered brow, seated himself at the piano, and bringing down his hands on the keys and his feet on the pedals, with a flourish, began to bang out a fantasia by Liszt on a Wagnerian theme, Aratoff could stand it no longer, and slipped away, bearing in his soul a confused and oppressive impression, athwart which, nevertheless, there pierced something which he did not understand, but which was significant and even agitating. III Kupfer came on the following day to dinner; but he did not enlarge upon the preceding evening, he did not even reproach Aratoff for his hasty flight, and merely expressed regret that he had not waited for supper, at which champagne had been served! (of Nizhegorod[54] fabrication, we may remark in parenthesis).