And he began hurriedly dressing.

By the time the horse was harnessed the sun was rising.  It had just left off raining, the clouds were racing swiftly by, and the patches of blue were growing bigger and bigger in the sky.  The first rays of the sun were timidly reflected below in the big puddles.  The visitor walked through the entry with his portfolio to get into the trap, and at that moment Zhmuhin’s wife, pale, and it seemed paler than the day before, with tear-stained eyes, looked at him intently without blinking, with the naive expression of a little girl, and it was evident from her dejected face that she was envying him his freedom—­oh, with what joy she would have gone away from there! —­and she wanted to say something to him, most likely to ask advice about her children.  And what a pitiable figure she was!  This was not a wife, not the head of a house, not even a servant, but more like a dependent, a poor relation not wanted by anyone, a nonentity . . . .  Her husband, fussing about, talking unceasingly, was seeing his visitor off, continually running in front of him, while she huddled up to the wall with a timid, guilty air, waiting for a convenient minute to speak.

“Please come again another time,” the old man kept repeating incessantly; “what we have we are glad to offer, you know.”

The visitor hurriedly got into the trap, evidently with relief, as though he were afraid every minute that they would detain him.  The trap lurched about as it had the day before, squeaked, and furiously rattled the pail that was tied on at the back.  He glanced round at Zhmuhin with a peculiar expression; it looked as though he wanted to call him a Petchenyeg, as the surveyor had once done, or some such name, but his gentleness got the upper hand.  He controlled himself and said nothing.  But in the gateway he suddenly could not restrain himself; he got up and shouted loudly and angrily: 

“You have bored me to death.”

And he disappeared through the gate.

Near the barn Zhmuhin’s sons were standing; the elder held a gun, while the younger had in his hands a grey cockerel with a bright red comb.  The younger flung up the cockerel with all his might; the bird flew upwards higher than the house and turned over in the air like a pigeon.  The elder boy fired and the cockerel fell like a stone.

The old man, overcome with confusion, not knowing how to explain the visitor’s strange, unexpected shout, went slowly back into the house.  And sitting down at the table he spent a long while meditating on the intellectual tendencies of the day, on the universal immorality, on the telegraph, on the telephone, on velocipedes, on how unnecessary it all was; little by little he regained his composure, then slowly had a meal, drank five glasses of tea, and lay down for a nap.

A DEAD BODY