There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian’s rooms, but it was just as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road.  I remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green box.  The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun.  Wherever I looked there were flies and flies and flies....  Grandfather and the Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats....  I knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar; that grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a quarter of the day waiting, after which there would be again the heat, the dust, the jolting cart.  I heard the muttering of the two voices, and it began to seem to me that I had been seeing the Armenian, the cupboard with the crockery, the flies, the windows with the burning sun beating on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the far-off future, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun, the flies....

A Little Russian peasant woman in a kerchief brought in a tray of tea-things, then the samovar.  The Armenian went slowly out into the passage and shouted:  “Mashya, come and pour out tea!  Where are you, Mashya?”

Hurried footsteps were heard, and there came into the room a girl of sixteen in a simple cotton dress and a white kerchief.  As she washed the crockery and poured out the tea, she was standing with her back to me, and all I could see was that she was of a slender figure, barefooted, and that her little bare heels were covered by long trousers.

The Armenian invited me to have tea.  Sitting down to the table, I glanced at the girl, who was handing me a glass of tea, and felt all at once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the impressions of the day with their dust and dreariness.  I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams.  Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.

I am ready to swear that Masha—­or, as her father called her, Mashya—­was a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it.  It sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colors them and the sky with tints of every possible shade—­crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban.  The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards....  And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.