blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other.
She talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her
whole figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse.
There was only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness
that she had been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she
was the widow of a general whom the servants had to address as "your
Excellency"; and when these feeble relics of life flickered up in
her for an instant she would say to her son:

"Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!"

Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air
of a hostess trying to entertain a visitor:

"You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are
used to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster
of Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here
at the station, and that is just the same as being on our own
property! The engineer is so nice! Don't you think he is very
handsome?"

Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but
since the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena
Nikiforovna had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going
to law, and to not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was
in constant terror of being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya
had become unrecognizable.

Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild,
and was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down