Then they went into the dining-room to coffee.  But they had hardly sat down, when the downstairs Masha rushed headlong in, saying with horror, “The singers!” And ran back again.  They heard some one blowing his nose, a low bass cough, and footsteps that sounded like horses’ iron-shod hoofs tramping about the entry near the hall.  For half a minute all was hushed. . . .  The singers burst out so suddenly and loudly that every one started.  While they were singing, the priest from the almshouses with the deacon and the sexton arrived.  Putting on the stole, the priest slowly said that when they were ringing for matins it was snowing and not cold, but that the frost was sharper towards morning, God bless it! and now there must be twenty degrees of frost.

“Many people maintain, though, that winter is healthier than summer,” said the deacon; then immediately assumed an austere expression and chanted after the priest.  “Thy Birth, O Christ our Lord. . . .”

Soon the priest from the workmen’s hospital came with the deacon, then the Sisters from the hospital, children from the orphanage, and then singing could be heard almost uninterruptedly.  They sang, had lunch, and went away.

About twenty men from the factory came to offer their Christmas greetings.  They were only the foremen, mechanicians, and their assistants, the pattern-makers, the accountant, and so on—­all of good appearance, in new black coats.  They were all first-rate men, as it were picked men; each one knew his value—­that is, knew that if he lost his berth today, people would be glad to take him on at another factory.  Evidently they liked Auntie, as they behaved freely in her presence and even smoked, and when they had all trooped in to have something to eat, the accountant put his arm round her immense waist.  They were free-and-easy, perhaps, partly also because Varvarushka, who under the old masters had wielded great power and had kept watch over the morals of the clerks, had now no authority whatever in the house; and perhaps because many of them still remembered the time when Auntie Tatyana Ivanovna, whose brothers kept a strict hand over her, had been dressed like a simple peasant woman like Agafya, and when Anna Akimovna used to run about the yard near the factory buildings and every one used to call her Anyutya.

The foremen ate, talked, and kept looking with amazement at Anna Akimovna, how she had grown up and how handsome she had become!  But this elegant girl, educated by governesses and teachers, was a stranger to them; they could not understand her, and they instinctively kept closer to “Auntie,” who called them by their names, continually pressed them to eat and drink, and, clinking glasses with them, had already drunk two wineglasses of rowanberry wine with them.  Anna Akimovna was always afraid of their thinking her proud, an upstart, or a crow in peacock’s feathers; and now while the foremen were crowding round the food, she did not leave the dining-room, but took part in the conversation.  She asked Pimenov, her acquaintance of the previous day: