“No, not far,” Kiryakov answers grimly.

They walk down one turning, a second, a third. . . .  Kiryakov strides along, and even in his step his respectability and positiveness is apparent.

“What awful weather!” the midwife observes to him.

But he preserves a dignified silence, and it is noticeable that he tries to step on the smooth stones to avoid spoiling his goloshes.  At last after a long walk the midwife steps into the entry; from which she can see a big decently furnished drawing-room.  There is not a soul in the rooms, even in the bedroom where the woman is lying in labour. . . .  The old women and relations who flock in crowds to every confinement are not to be seen.  The cook rushes about alone, with a scared and vacant face.  There is a sound of loud groans.

Three hours pass.  Marya Petrovna sits by the mother’s bedside and whispers to her.  The two women have already had time to make friends, they have got to know each other, they gossip, they sigh together. . . .

“You mustn’t talk,” says the midwife anxiously, and at the same time she showers questions on her.

Then the door opens and Kiryakov himself comes quietly and stolidly into the room.  He sits down in the chair and strokes his whiskers.  Silence reigns.  Marya Petrovna looks timidly at his handsome, passionless, wooden face and waits for him to begin to talk, but he remains absolutely silent and absorbed in thought.  After waiting in vain, the midwife makes up her mind to begin herself, and utters a phrase commonly used at confinements.

“Well now, thank God, there is one human being more in the world!”

“Yes, that’s agreeable,” said Kiryakov, preserving the wooden expression of his face, “though indeed, on the other hand, to have more children you must have more money.  The baby is not born fed and clothed.”

A guilty expression comes into the mother’s face, as though she had brought a creature into the world without permission or through idle caprice.  Kiryakov gets up with a sigh and walks with solid dignity out of the room.

“What a man, bless him!” says the midwife to the mother.  “He’s so stern and does not smile.”

The mother tells her that he is always like that. . . .  He is honest, fair, prudent, sensibly economical, but all that to such an exceptional degree that simple mortals feel suffocated by it.  His relations have parted from him, the servants will not stay more than a month; they have no friends; his wife and children are always on tenterhooks from terror over every step they take.  He does not shout at them nor beat them, his virtues are far more numerous than his defects, but when he goes out of the house they all feel better, and more at ease.  Why it is so the woman herself cannot say.

“The basins must be properly washed and put away in the store cupboard,” says Kiryakov, coming into the bedroom.  “These bottles must be put away too:  they may come in handy.”