And—what was strangest of all, what can happen only in Russia—not long afterwards he would again meet the friends who had thrashed him, and they would meet as if nothing had happened, and it was, as they say, fine with him, and fine with them. Nozdryov was in a certain respect a storied man. Not one gathering he attended went by without some story. Some sort of story inevitably occurred: either he was taken under the arm and removed from the hall by gendarmes, or his own friends were obliged to throw him out. And if that did not happen, then something else did, of a sort that never happened to
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