With long rapid strides he walks straight up to the table. Gentlemen, he says, in a loud voice, almost shouting, yet stammering at every word. I'm all right. Don't be afraid. There's nothing the matter. He turns suddenly to Grushenka, who has shrunk back in her chair towards Kalganov and clasped his hand tightly. I'm coming, too. He is not driven out. He drops into a chair, turns his head to the opposite wall, and the tears come, while his arms clasp the back of the chair as though he were embracing it. Come, come, they say to him. Champagne is brought. A childlike look comes into his face. He seems to have become suddenly gentle. Maximov is there, the little old man who will talk. The Poles are there. One of them wears a wig. They drink. Grushenka watches, and she does not send him away.
Kalganov is not over twenty, dressed like a dandy, with a charming fair-skinned face. Grushenka knew him before. She had once been seen with someone, and she had not taken to him then. Before Dmitri arrived she had been making much of the boy, and he seemed unmoved by it. Maximov tells a story of being thrashed, and when they ask what for, he says it was for his education. People can thrash a man for anything. Grushenka cuts them short. That is enough. That is all stupid. She does not want to listen. She thought it would be amusing. Dmitri leaves off laughing at once. The tall Pole rises, and with the haughty air of a man bored and out of his element, begins pacing the room.
They sit down to cards. The Poles drink to Russia as she was before 1772, and Dmitri calls them fools. Pan Vrublevsky is at the table. Faro is the game, and the Poles take Dmitri's money with a steadiness that empties him. He plays as if the money were nothing, and the room watches. Kalganov grows hot. He is young, and he is not amused by the way the cards are going. Grushenka's face changes as the stakes go on. The party that began in tears and champagne has become a game in which the guests are skinning the man who asked only to be allowed to stay.
He asks the little pan into the next room. He has two words to say, something pleasant, very pleasant. The pan is taken aback and will come only if Pan Vrublevsky comes too. The bodyguard, Dmitri says. Let him come. He wants him. March. Grushenka asks, anxiously, where they are going. In the other room he offers them three thousand roubles to go, to leave her, to be gone before morning. The offer does not stay in the other room. Am I for sale? she cries. Panie, panie, he shouts. She is pure and shining, and he has never been her lover. The officer is not the falcon she cried over for five years. He is a gander. He used to laugh and sing to her. She has been crying for five years, a damned fool, abject and shameless. The cards are marked. Dmitri tells them he could send them to Siberia for playing with false cards, for it is the same as false banknotes. Kalganov cries that he twice saw the pan change a card. How shameful, Grushenka says, clasping her hands, blushing for genuine shame. Good Lord, he's come to that. Before Dmitri has finished, Vrublevsky, confused and infuriated, shakes his fist at her and shouts that she is a low harlot. Dmitri flies at him, clutches him in both hands, and lifts him. The officer's spell is broken in the shout and in the hands that take hold of him.
