The excitement of Christmas was passing off, and to keep it up Anna Akimovna sat down at the piano again and softly played one of the new waltzes, then she remembered how cleverly and creditably she had spoken at dinner today.  She looked round at the dark windows, at the walls with the pictures, at the faint light that came from the big room, and all at once she began suddenly crying, and she felt vexed that she was so lonely, and that she had no one to talk to and consult.  To cheer herself she tried to picture Pimenov in her imagination, but it was unsuccessful.

It struck twelve.  Mishenka, no longer wearing his swallow-tail but in his reefer jacket, came in, and without speaking lighted two candles; then he went out and returned a minute later with a cup of tea on a tray.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked, noticing a smile on his face.

“I was downstairs and heard the jokes you were making about Pimenov . . .” he said, and put his hand before his laughing mouth.  “If he were sat down to dinner today with Viktor Nikolaevitch and the general, he’d have died of fright.”  Mishenka’s shoulders were shaking with laughter.  “He doesn’t know even how to hold his fork, I bet.”

The footman’s laughter and words, his reefer jacket and moustache, gave Anna Akimovna a feeling of uncleanness.  She shut her eyes to avoid seeing him, and, against her own will, imagined Pimenov dining with Lysevitch and Krylin, and his timid, unintellectual figure seemed to her pitiful and helpless, and she felt repelled by it.  And only now, for the first time in the whole day, she realized clearly that all she had said and thought about Pimenov and marrying a workman was nonsense, folly, and wilfulness.  To convince herself of the opposite, to overcome her repulsion, she tried to recall what she had said at dinner, but now she could not see anything in it:  shame at her own thoughts and actions, and the fear that she had said something improper during the day, and disgust at her own lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely.  She took up a candle and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been joking.  Then she went to her bedroom.  Red-haired Masha, who was dozing in an arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the pillows.  Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had fallen on one side.

“Tchalikov came again this evening,” she said, yawning, “but I did not dare to announce him; he was very drunk.  He says he will come again tomorrow.”

“What does he want with me?” said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb on the floor.  “I won’t see him, I won’t.”

She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov, that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was.  So all she was fit for was to help the poor.  Oh, how stupid it was!