The dinner was to Foma a real torture. For the first time in his
life among these uniformed people, he saw that they were eating
and speaking--doing everything better than he, and he felt that
between him and Medinskaya, who was seated just opposite him, was
a high mountain, not a table. Beside him sat the secretary of the
society of which Foma had been made an honorary member; he was a
young court officer, bearing the odd name of Ookhtishchev. As if
to make his name appear more absurd than it really was, he spoke
in a loud, ringing tenor, and altogether--plump, short, round-
faced and a lively talker--he looked like a brand new bell.
"The very best thing in our society is the patroness; the most
reasonable is what we are doing--courting the patroness; the most
difficult is to tell the patroness such a compliment as would
satisfy her; and the most sensible thing is to admire the patroness
silently and hopelessly. So that in reality, you are a member not of
'the Society of Solicitude,' and so on, but of the Society of
Tantaluses, which is composed of persons bent on pleasing Sophya
Medinskaya.
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