as a good friend of yours I give you warning."

He goes away. When his steps are abating on the stairs and the
front door bangs to behind him, Emma Edwardovna snorts through her
nose and says contemptuously:

"Stool-pigeon! He wants to take money both here and there..."

Little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. It is dark
in the house. It smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. Quiet
reigns.





CHAPTER III.


Until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time
drags endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. And, in
general, this daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the
life of the house. It remotely resembles in its moods those
slothful, empty hours which are lived through during the great
holidays in scholastic institutes and other private institutions
for females, when all the friends have dispersed, when there is
much leisure and much indolence, and a radiant, agreeable tedium
reigns the whole day. In only their petticoats and white shifts,
with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the women aimlessly ramble
from room to room, all of them unwashed, uncombed; lazily strike