“I should think he could buy!” Tcheprakov said of the engineer.  “See what he fleeces out of the contractors alone!  He fleeces everyone!”

Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with him in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.

“She is a bit stingy,” he said, “but she won’t charge you much.”

It was very cramped in the little rooms in which his mother lived; they were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture which had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the furniture was all old-fashioned mahogany.  Madame Tcheprakov, a very stout middle-aged lady with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big arm-chair by the window, knitting a stocking.  She received me ceremoniously.

“This is Poloznev, mamma,” Tcheprakov introduced me.  “He is going to serve here.”

“Are you a nobleman?” she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice:  it seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Sit down.”

The dinner was a poor one.  Nothing was served but pies filled with bitter curd, and milk soup.  Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other.  She talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her whole figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse.  There was only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness that she had been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she was the widow of a general whom the servants had to address as “your Excellency”; and when these feeble relics of life flickered up in her for an instant she would say to her son: 

“Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!”

Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air of a hostess trying to entertain a visitor: 

“You know we have sold our estate.  Of course, it is a pity, we are used to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster of Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here at the station, and that is just the same as being on our own property!  The engineer is so nice!  Don’t you think he is very handsome?”

Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but since the death of the general everything had been changed.  Elena Nikiforovna had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going to law, and to not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was in constant terror of being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya had become unrecognizable.