“They will always be opponents of our commercial interests,” Mayakin whispered loudly and convincingly, standing beside the city mayor, not far from Foma. “What is it to them? All they want is somehow to deserve the approval of the newspaper. But they cannot reach the main point. They live for mere display, not for the organisation of life; these are their only measures: the newspapers and Sweden! [Mayakin speaks of Sweden, meaning Switzerland.--Translator’s note.] The doctor scoffed at me all day yesterday with this Sweden. The public education, says he, in Sweden, and everything else there is first-class! But what is Sweden, anyway? It may be that Sweden is but a fib, is but used as an example, and that there is no education whatever or any of the other things there. And then, we don’t live for the sake of Sweden, and Sweden cannot put us to test. We have to make our lip according to our own last. Isn’t it so?” And the archdeacon droned, his head thrown back: “Eternal me-emo-ory to the founder of this ho-ouse!” Foma shuddered, but Mayakin was already by his side, and pulling him by the sleeve, asked: “Are you going to the dinner?” And Medinskaya’s velvet-like, warm little hand glided once more over Foma’s hand. The dinner was to Foma a real torture. For the first time in his life among these uniformed people, he saw that they were eating and speaking--doing everything better than he, and he felt that between him and Medinskaya, who was seated just opposite him, was a high mountain, not a table. Beside him sat the secretary of the society of which Foma had been made an honorary member; he was a young court officer, bearing the odd name of Ookhtishchev. As if to make his name appear more absurd than it really was, he spoke in a loud, ringing tenor, and altogether--plump, short, round-faced and a lively talker--he looked like a brand new bell. “The very best thing in our society is the patroness; the most reasonable is what we are doing--courting the patroness; the most difficult is to tell the patroness such a compliment as would satisfy her; and the most sensible thing is to admire the patroness silently and hopelessly. So that in reality, you are a member not of ‘the Society of Solicitude,’ and so on, but of the Society of Tantaluses, which is composed of persons bent on pleasing Sophya Medinskaya.”