Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 0was so bewildered that he did not know what to do with it.
Kalgonov took it from him and poured out the champagne.
‘Another! Another bottle!’ Mitya cried to the inn-keep-
er, and, forgetting to clink glasses with the Pole whom he
had so solemnly invited to drink to their good understand-
ing, he drank off his glass without waiting for anyone else.
His whole countenance suddenly changed. The solemn
and tragic expression with which he had entered vanished
completely, and a look of something childlike came into
his face. He seemed to have become suddenly gentle and
subdued. He looked shyly and happily at everyone, with a
continual nervous little laugh, and the blissful expression
of a dog who has done wrong, been punished, and forgiven.
He seemed to have forgotten everything, and was look-
ing round at everyone with a childlike smile of delight. He
looked at Grushenka, laughing continually, and bringing
his chair close up to her. By degrees he had gained some
idea of the two Poles, though he had formed no definite
conception of them yet.
The Pole on the sofa struck him by his dignified demean-
our and his Polish accent; and, above all, by his pipe. ‘Well,
what of it? It’s a good thing he’s smoking a pipe,’ he reflected.
The Pole’s puffy, middle-aged face, with its tiny nose and
two very thin, pointed, dyed and impudent-looking mous-
taches, had not so far roused the faintest doubts in Mitya.
He was not even particularly struck by the Pole’s absurd
wig made in Siberia, with love-locks foolishly combed for-
ward over the temples. ‘I suppose it’s all right since he wears
a wig,’ he went on, musing blissfully. The other, younger