Korobochka fears selling too cheap

Selifan lectures the crafty dappled trace-horse on righteous living while a thunderstorm breaks, the road turns to mud, and he misses every turning. Drunk and cheerfully unrepentant — "you can have a bite with a good man" — he overturns the britska and tips Chichikov into the mud. Dogs lead them to the house of Nastasya Petrovna Korobochka, a widow in a hastily donned nightcap with flannel round her throat, who keeps her savings in little calico bags and whose blacksmith recently burned up from the inside. Over tea and fruit vodka the next morning, Chichikov offers to buy her eighteen dead souls. She cannot follow it: would he dig them up? Might they come in handy? Perhaps she should wait and see what merchants pay. He sweats through every argument and loses his temper, then wins her with an invented hint about government contracts. She sells for fifteen roubles and feeds him pancakes.

The second portrait, and the first where the scheme meets resistance. Manilov gave the souls away; Korobochka cannot grasp the transaction at all, which proves far harder to defeat. The chapter establishes that Chichikov's logic breaks against stupidity rather than conscience, and plants the widow as the fuse that detonates in Chapter 9.