been for his wife, he would probably never have gone to confession, taken the sacrament or kept the fasts.  While her uncle, Ivan Ivanovitch, on the contrary, was like flint; in everything relating to religion, politics, and morality, he was harsh and relentless, and kept a strict watch, not only over himself, but also over all his servants and acquaintances.  God forbid that one should go into his room without crossing oneself before the ikon!  The luxurious mansion in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had always kept locked up, and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with ikons.  He had leanings towards the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened, and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox rites.  He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his indifference to religion.  He treated him as an inferior, kept him in the position of a workman, paid him sixteen roubles a month.  Akim addressed his brother with formal respect, and on the days of asking forgiveness, he and his wife and daughter bowed down to the ground before him.  But three years before his death Ivan Ivanovitch had drawn closer to his brother, forgave his shortcomings, and ordered him to get a governess for Anyutka.

There was a dark, deep, evil-smelling archway under Gushtchin’s Buildings; there was a sound of men coughing near the walls.  Leaving the sledge in the street, Anna Akimovna went in at the gate and there inquired how to get to No. 46 to see a clerk called Tchalikov.  She was directed to the furthest door on the right in the third story.  And in the courtyard and near the outer door, and even on the stairs, there was still the same loathsome smell as under the archway.  In Anna Akimovna’s childhood, when her father was a simple workman, she used to live in a building like that, and afterwards, when their circumstances were different, she had often visited them in the character of a Lady Bountiful.  The narrow stone staircase with its steep dirty steps, with landings at every story; the greasy swinging lanterns; the stench; the troughs, pots, and rags on the landings near the doors,—­all this had been familiar to her long ago. . . .  One door was open, and within could be seen Jewish tailors in caps, sewing.  Anna Akimovna met people on the stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her.  She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than of her acquaintances of the educated class.