No, I won't.

KHLESTAKOV. How dare you, you fool!

OSIP. It won't do any good, anyhow. The landlord said he won't let you have anything more to eat.

KHLESTAKOV. How dare he! What nonsense is this?

OSIP. He'll go to the Governor, too, he says. It's two weeks now since you've paid him, he says. You and your master are cheats, he says, and your master is a blackleg besides, he says. We know the breed. We've seen swindlers like him before.

KHLESTAKOV. And you're delighted, I suppose, to repeat all this to me, you donkey.

OSIP. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry comes and lives here," he says, "and runs up debts so that you can't even put him out. I'm not going to fool about it," he says, "I'm going straight to the Governor and have him arrested and put in jail."

KHLESTAKOV. That'll do now, you fool. Go down at once and tell him to have dinner sent up. The coarse brute! The idea!

OSIP. Hadn't I better call the landlord here?

KHLESTAKOV. What do I want the landlord for? Go and tell him yourself.

OSIP. But really, master—

KHLESTAKOV. Well, go, the deuce take you. Call the landlord.

Osip goes out.

Scene III

KHLESTAKOV (alone). I am so ravenously hungry. I took a little stroll thinking I could walk off my appetite. But, hang it, it clings. If I hadn't dissipated so in Penza I'd have had enough money to get home with. The infantry captain did me up all right. Wonderful the way the scoundrel cut the cards! It didn't take more than a quarter of an hour for him to clean me out of my last penny. And yet I would give anything to have another set-to with him. Only I never will have the chance.—What a rotten town this is! You can't get anything on credit in the grocery shops here. It's deucedly mean, it is.