Read "Albert" by Leo Tolstoy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Five rich young men went at three o'clock in the morning to a ball in Petersburg to have a good time.
Much champagne was drunk; a majority of the gentlemen were very young; the girls were pretty; a pianist and a fiddler played indefatigably one polka after another; there was no cease to the noise of conversation and dancing. But there was a sense of awkwardness and constraint; everyone felt somehow or other -- and this is not unusual -- that all was not as it should be.