– the dregs of society, if ever there were. Those who were a bit older and a bit more respectable had all made themselves scarce, as if by prior agreement. Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, for example, the most respectable of all the tenants, was nowhere to be seen, yet only the previous evening Katerina Ivanovna had been telling anyone who would listen – namely, Amalia Ivanovna, Polechka, Sonya and the Pole – that he was the noblest and most high-minded of men, that he had vast connections and great wealth, that he’d been a friend of her first husband and was received by her father at home, and that he was promising to do all he could to arrange a sizeable pension for her. We should note at this point that if Katerina Ivanovna boasted of someone else’s connections and means, she did so without any personal interest or design, entirely selflessly, from the warmth of her heart, as it were, and for no other reason than the pleasure of ascribing even greater merit to the object of her praise. ‘That toad Lebezyatnikov’ hadn’t shown up either – he must have ‘taken his cue’ from Luzhin. ‘Who does he think he is? We only invited him out of the goodness of our hearts and because he shares a room with Pyotr Petrovich, his acquaintance. It would have been awkward not to.’ Also absent were a lady of fashion and her ‘overripe wench of a daughter’ – they’d only been lodging at Amalia Ivanovna’s for two weeks, but they’d already made several complaints about the hue and cry emanating from the Marmeladovs’ room, especially when the deceased came home drunk, and these, needless to say, had been conveyed to Katerina Ivanovna by Amalia Ivanovna herself when she, quarrelling with Katerina Ivanovna and threatening to throw out the entire family, yelled at the top of her voice that they were disturbing ‘noble tenants whose toes they were not worth’. So Katerina Ivanovna had made a point of inviting this lady and her daughter, ‘whose toes they were not worth’, especially as the lady was in the habit of turning away from her in disdain whenever they chanced to meet – well, now was the time for her to find out that around here ‘people have a nobler way of thinking and feeling, and issue invitations without bearing grudges’, and for them to see that this was the least Katerina Ivanovna was accustomed to. Her plan was to explain this to them during the meal, and to tell them about the governorship of her late papa, while giving them to understand that there was no need for them to turn away on meeting her and that nothing could be more silly. Absent, too, was the fat lieutenant colonel (actually, a retired junior captain), who, it turned out, had been ‘the worse for wear’ since the previous morning. In short, the only people present were: the Pole; a shabby, tongue-tied paper-pusher, wearing a soiled tailcoat, ridden with acne and smelling disgusting; and a deaf and almost completely blind old man, who’d once worked in some post office and whom someone, since time immemorial and for reasons unknown, had been maintaining at Amalia Ivanovna’s. There was also a drunk retired lieutenant – actually, a quartermaster – who had the loudest and most indecent laugh imaginable and who appeared (‘Fancy that!’) without a waistcoat! Some other chap just sat down at the table without even a bow in Katerina Ivanovna’s direction; and, lastly, one character, lacking the appropriate attire, turned up in his house-gown, but this was simply too indecent and he was shown out through the joint efforts of Amalia Ivanovna and the Pole. The Pole, though, had brought along two more compatriots, who had never once stayed at Amalia Ivanovna’s and whom no one had ever seen in her rooms before. Katerina Ivanovna found it all extremely disagreeable and extremely annoying. ‘So who have we gone to all this bother for?’ To make space, the children were not even at the table, which already took up the whole of the room, but on a trunk in the far corner, where both the little ones were sat on a bench, while Polechka, being the eldest, was charged with watching over them, feeding them and keeping their noses clean, ‘like all noble children’. In short, Katerina Ivanovna found herself greeting everyone with redoubled self-importance, even haughtiness. She ran a particularly fierce eye over some of the guests,