army captain was working hard with body and soul and arms and legs, executing such steps as no one had ever executed before in his wildest dreams. Tchitchikov dashed by the mazurka almost on the dancers' heels, and straight to the place where the governor's wife was sitting with her daughter. He approached them, however, very timidly; he did not trip up to them with jaunty and foppish little steps, he even shifted from one foot to the other uneasily, and there was an awkwardness in all his movements.
It cannot be said for certain that the passion of love was stirring in our hero's heart: it is doubtful, indeed, if gentlemen of his sort, that is, not precisely fat and yet not what you would call thin, are capable of falling in love; but for all that there was something strange about it, something which he could not have explained to himself; it seemed to him, as he admitted to himself afterwards, as though the whole ball with all its noise and conversation became for a few minutes, as it were, far away; the fiddles and trumpets droned somewhere in the distance, and all were lost in fog like some carelessly painted background in a picture. And from this foggy, roughly sketched background nothing stood out clearly but the delicate features of the fair charmer: the oval little face, the slender, slender figure such as one sees only in girls who have just left school, the white, almost plain dress lightly and elegantly draping her graceful young limbs, and following their pure lines. It seemed as though she
