She treated me as a flunkey, a being of a lower order.  One may pat a dog, and yet not notice it; I was given orders and asked questions, but my presence was not observed.  My master and mistress thought it unseemly to say more to me than is usually said to servants; if when waiting at dinner I had laughed or put in my word in the conversation, they would certainly have thought I was mad and have dismissed me.  Zinaida Fyodorovna was favourably disposed to me, all the same.  When she was sending me on some errand or explaining to me the working of a new lamp or anything of that sort, her face was extraordinarily kind, frank, and cordial, and her eyes looked me straight in the face.  At such moments I always fancied she remembered with gratitude how I used to bring her letters to Znamensky Street.  When she rang the bell, Polya, who considered me her favourite and hated me for it, used to say with a jeering smile: 

“Go along, your mistress wants you.”

Zinaida Fyodorovna considered me as a being of a lower order, and did not suspect that if any one in the house were in a humiliating position it was she.  She did not know that I, a footman, was unhappy on her account, and used to ask myself twenty times a day what was in store for her and how it would all end.  Things were growing visibly worse day by day.  After the evening on which they had talked of his official work, Orlov, who could not endure tears, unmistakably began to avoid conversation with her; whenever Zinaida Fyodorovna began to argue, or to beseech him, or seemed on the point of crying, he seized some plausible excuse for retreating to his study or going out.  He more and more rarely slept at home, and still more rarely dined there:  on Thursdays he was the one to suggest some expedition to his friends.  Zinaida Fyodorovna was still dreaming of having the cooking done at home, of moving to a new flat, of travelling abroad, but her dreams remained dreams.  Dinner was sent in from the restaurant.  Orlov asked her not to broach the question of moving until after they had come back from abroad, and apropos of their foreign tour, declared that they could not go till his hair had grown long, as one could not go trailing from hotel to hotel and serving the idea without long hair.

To crown it all, in Orlov’s absence, Kukushkin began calling at the flat in the evening.  There was nothing exceptional in his behaviour, but I could never forget the conversation in which he had offered to cut Orlov out.  He was regaled with tea and red wine, and he used to titter and, anxious to say something pleasant, would declare that a free union was superior in every respect to legal marriage, and that all decent people ought really to come to Zinaida Fyodorovna and fall at her feet.

VIII

Christmas was spent drearily in vague anticipations of calamity.  On New Year’s Eve Orlov unexpectedly announced at breakfast that he was being sent to assist a senator who was on a revising commission in a certain province.