“Why have you so many clocks in your room?”

“I mend clocks,” he answered.  “I take the work up between times, on holidays, or when I can’t sleep.”

“So if my watch goes wrong I can bring it to you to be repaired?” Anna Akimovna asked, laughing.

“To be sure, I will do it with pleasure,” said Pimenov, and there was an expression of tender devotion in his face, when, not herself knowing why, she unfastened her magnificent watch from its chain and handed it to him; he looked at it in silence and gave it back.  “To be sure, I will do it with pleasure,” he repeated.  “I don’t mend watches now.  My eyes are weak, and the doctors have forbidden me to do fine work.  But for you I can make an exception.”

“Doctors talk nonsense,” said the accountant.  They all laughed.  “Don’t you believe them,” he went on, flattered by the laughing; “last year a tooth flew out of a cylinder and hit old Kalmykov such a crack on the head that you could see his brains, and the doctor said he would die; but he is alive and working to this day, only he has taken to stammering since that mishap.”

“Doctors do talk nonsense, they do, but not so much,” sighed Auntie.  “Pyotr Andreyitch, poor dear, lost his sight.  Just like you, he used to work day in day out at the factory near the hot furnace, and he went blind.  The eyes don’t like heat.  But what are we talking about?” she said, rousing herself.  “Come and have a drink.  My best wishes for Christmas, my dears.  I never drink with any one else, but I drink with you, sinful woman as I am.  Please God!”

Anna Akimovna fancied that after yesterday Pimenov despised her as a philanthropist, but was fascinated by her as a woman.  She looked at him and thought that he behaved very charmingly and was nicely dressed.  It is true that the sleeves of his coat were not quite long enough, and the coat itself seemed short-waisted, and his trousers were not wide and fashionable, but his tie was tied carelessly and with taste and was not as gaudy as the others’.  And he seemed to be a good-natured man, for he ate submissively whatever Auntie put on his plate.  She remembered how black he had been the day before, and how sleepy, and the thought of it for some reason touched her.

When the men were preparing to go, Anna Akimovna put out her hand to Pimenov.  She wanted to ask him to come in sometimes to see her, without ceremony, but she did not know how to—­her tongue would not obey her; and that they might not think she was attracted by Pimenov, she shook hands with his companions, too.

Then the boys from the school of which she was a patroness came.  They all had their heads closely cropped and all wore grey blouses of the same pattern.  The teacher—­a tall, beardless young man with patches of red on his face—­was visibly agitated as he formed the boys into rows; the boys sang in tune, but with harsh, disagreeable voices.  The manager of the factory, Nazaritch, a bald, sharp-eyed