Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/254

extracts; but no one knew what they were about. He was however a wit, flowery in his language, and fond as he expressed it of flavouring his words. And he did flavour his words with a number of all sorts of little phrases such as: 'My dear sir, you know, you understand, you can fancy, as regards, so to say, in a certain sense,' and so on, which he scattered freely about him; he flavoured his language also rather successfully by winking and screwing up one eye, which gave a very biting expression to many of his satirical allusions. The others were all more or less cultured people, one read Karamzin, another read the Moscow News, while there were others who actually read nothing at all. Some were the sort of men who need a kick to make them rise to anything; others were simply sluggards lying all their lives on one side, as the saying is, and it would have been a waste of time to lift them up, they wouldn't have stood up under any circumstances. As far as health and appearance goes, they were all, as we have said already, sound people, there wasn't one consumptive among them. They were all of the kind to whom wives in moments of tender tête-à-tête use such endearing epithets as 'tubby,' 'fatty,' 'chubby,' 'dumpling,' 'zou-zou,' and so on. But, take them all in all, they were a good-natured set, full of hospitality, and a man who had eaten their salt or spent the evening playing whist with them was at once near and dear to them, and Tchitchikov, with his fascinating qualities and manners, and his real