“So I say, ‘Let’s have twenty roubles down on the spot, and I’ll have her.’
“Well, you needn’t believe it unless you please, but I was drunk right up to the wedding-day. Then Philka Marosof kept threatening me all the time.
“’I’ll break every bone in your body, a nice fellow you to be engaged, and to Akoulka; if I like I’ll sleep every blessed night with her when she’s your wife.’
“’You’re a hound, and a liar,’ that’s what I said to him. But he insulted me so in the street, before everybody, that I ran to Aukoudim’s and said, ‘I won’t marry her unless I have fifty roubles down this moment.’”
“And they really did give her to you in marriage?”
“Me? Why not, I should like to know? We were respectable people enough. Father had been ruined by a fire a little before he died; he had been a r
