The customers registered only as the opening and closing of mouths, all sound and sense being drowned by Rusalochka’s mighty Garmoniphon, the great golden organ which with its soaring array of Garmonica pipes occupied the whole of one wall of the demonic tearooms. A German in a frock-coat played it, or perhaps a series of Germans in frock-coats, closely resembling each other. At home, the merchants preferred the old Russian songs, but not here, not at Rusalochka’s, a very expensive place, by the way, where one saw and was seen, and where first Grieg and then Offenbach’s Belle Hélène were now
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