"I can wait for you in the street. I think it's loathsome, really!"

"Come, come, Grisha.... If it is loathsome, you can observe it! Do
you understand? You can observe!"

"One must take an objective view of things," said the medical student
gravely.

Vassilyev went into the drawing-room and sat down. There were a number
of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry
officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless
youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who
looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these
visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.

Only one of them, dressed _a la Aida,_ glanced sideways at him, smiled,
and said, yawning: "A dark one has come...."

Vassilyev's heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed
before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and
miserable. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving
man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and
felt nothing but repulsion towards them. He felt pity neither for the
women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.

"It is because I am not trying to understand them," he thought. "They
are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are
human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them
and then judge...."