My uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us; I sat on a box listening to him and dropping to sleep.  It distressed me that he did not once all the evening pay attention to me.  He left the lodge at two o’clock, when, overcome with drowsiness, I was sound asleep.

From that time forth my uncle took to coming to the lodge every evening.  He sang with us, had supper with us, and always stayed on till two o’clock in the morning, chatting incessantly, always about the same subject.  His evening and night work was given up, and by the end of June, when the privy councillor had learned to eat mother’s turkey and compote, his work by day was abandoned too.  My uncle tore himself away from his table and plunged into “life.”  In the daytime he walked up and down the garden, he whistled to the workmen and hindered them from working, making them tell him their various histories.  When his eye fell on Tatyana Ivanovna he ran up to her, and, if she were carrying anything, offered his assistance, which embarrassed her dreadfully.

As the summer advanced my uncle grew more and more frivolous, volatile, and careless.  Pobyedimsky was completely disillusioned in regard to him.

“He is too one-sided,” he said.  “There is nothing to show that he is in the very foremost ranks of the service.  And he doesn’t even know how to talk.  At every word it’s ‘upon my soul.’  No, I don’t like him!”

From the time that my uncle began visiting the lodge there was a noticeable change both in Fyodor and my tutor.  Fyodor gave up going out shooting, came home early, sat more taciturn than ever, and stared with particular ill-humour at his wife.  In my uncle’s presence my tutor gave up talking about epizootics, frowned, and even laughed sarcastically.

“Here comes our little bantam cock!” he growled on one occasion when my uncle was coming into the lodge.

I put down this change in them both to their being offended with my uncle.  My absent-minded uncle mixed up their names, and to the very day of his departure failed to distinguish which was my tutor and which was Tatyana Ivanovna’s husband.  Tatyana Ivanovna herself he sometimes called Nastasya, sometimes Pelagea, and sometimes Yevdokia.  Touched and delighted by us, he laughed and behaved exactly as though in the company of small children....  All this, of course, might well offend young men.  It was not a case of offended pride, however, but, as I realize now, subtler feelings.

I remember one evening I was sitting on the box struggling with sleep.  My eyelids felt glued together and my body, tired out by running about all day, drooped sideways.  But I struggled against sleep and tried to look on.  It was about midnight.  Tatyana Ivanovna, rosy and unassuming as always, was sitting at a little table sewing at her husband’s shirt.  Fyodor, sullen and gloomy, was staring at her from one corner, and in the other sat Pobyedimsky, snorting angrily and retreating into the high collar of his shirt.  My uncle was walking up and down the room thinking.  Silence reigned; nothing was to be heard but the rustling of the linen in Tatyana Ivanovna’s hands.  Suddenly my uncle stood still before Tatyana Ivanovna, and said: