"It is amazing to see how much people will believe," she said, putting out
her candle and snuffing it with her thumb and forefinger. Then she began
to arrange the boxes she had brought, setting them in order upon the
shelves. Still neither of the men answered her. But she was not the woman
to be reduced to silence by silence.
"I am always telling you that it is all rubbish," she continued, turning a
broad expanse of alpaca-covered back upon her audience. "I am always
telling you that you are no more a count than Fischelowitz is a grand
duke, that the whole thing is a foolish imagination which you have stuck
into your head, as one sticks tobacco into a paper shell. And it ought to
be burned out of your head, or starved out, or knocked out, or something,
for if it stays there it will addle your brains altogether. Why cannot you
see that you are in the world just like other people, and give up all
these ridiculous dreams and all this chatter about counts and princes and
such like people, of whom you never spoke to one in your life, for all you
may say?"
The Count glanced at the back of Akulina's head, which was decently
covered by a flattened twist of very shining black hair, and then he
looked at Fischelowitz as though to inquire whether the latter would
suffer a gentleman to be thus insulted in his presence and on his
premises. Fischelowitz seemed embarrassed, and coloured a little.
"You might choose your language a little more carefully, wife," he
observed in a rather timid tone.
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