“You play the piano?” he asked Vera, and immediately leapt up, as she had dropped her handkerchief.

He stayed from midday to midnight without speaking, and Vera found him very unattractive.  She thought that a white waistcoat in the country was bad form, and his elaborate politeness, his manners, and his pale, serious face with dark eyebrows, were mawkish; and it seemed to her that he was perpetually silent, probably because he was stupid.  When he had gone her aunt said enthusiastically: 

“Well?  Isn’t he charming?”

II

Auntie Dasha looked after the estate.  Tightly laced, with jingling bracelets on her wrists, she went into the kitchen, the granary, the cattle-yard, tripping along with tiny steps, wriggling her spine; and whenever she talked to the steward or to the peasants, she used, for some reason, to put on a pince-nez.  Vera’s grandfather always sat in the same place, playing patience or dozing.  He ate a very great deal at dinner and supper; they gave him the dinner cooked to-day and what was left from yesterday, and cold pie left from Sunday, and salt meat from the servants’ dinner, and he ate it all greedily.  And every dinner left on Vera such an impression, that when she saw afterwards a flock of sheep driven by, or flour being brought from the mill, she thought, “Grandfather will eat that.”  For the most part he was silent, absorbed in eating or in patience; but it sometimes happened at dinner that at the sight of Vera he would be touched and say tenderly: 

“My only grandchild!  Verotchka!”

And tears would glisten in his eyes.  Or his face would turn suddenly crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the servants, and ask, tapping with his stick: 

“Why haven’t you brought the horse-radish?”

In winter he led a perfectly inactive existence; in summer he sometimes drove out into the fields to look at the oats and the hay; and when he came back he would flourish his stick and declare that everything was neglected now that he was not there to look after it.

“Your grandfather is out of humour,” Auntie Dasha would whisper.  “But it’s nothing now to what it used to be in the old days:  ‘Twenty-five strokes!  The birch!’”

Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did anything, and that the estate yielded no profit.  Indeed, there was no systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from habit, and in reality did nothing and lived in idleness.  Meanwhile there was a running to and fro, reckoning and worrying all day long; the bustle in the house began at five o’clock in the morning; there were continual sounds of “Bring it,” “Fetch it,” “Make haste,” and by the evening the servants were utterly exhausted.  Auntie Dasha changed her cooks and her housemaids every week; sometimes she discharged them for immorality; sometimes they