After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed.  Then Anisim walked about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly thinking of something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly, silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth.  He expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon, on Low Sunday, nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on whistling.  And it was evident he was only getting married because his father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was the custom in the village to marry the son in order to have a woman to help in the house.  When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether not as he had done on previous visits—­was particularly free and easy, and talked inappropriately.

III

In the village Shikalovo lived two dressmakers, sisters, belonging to the Flagellant sect.  The new clothes for the wedding were ordered from them, and they often came to try them on, and stayed a long while drinking tea.  They were making Varvara a brown dress with black lace and bugles on it, and Aksinya a light green dress with a yellow front, with a train.  When the dressmakers had finished their work Tsybukin paid them not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed, carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the open country they sat down on a hillock and cried.

Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new clothes from top to toe.  He had dazzling india-rubber goloshes, and instead of a cravat wore a red cord with little balls on it, and over his shoulder he had hung an overcoat, also new, without putting his arms into the sleeves.

After crossing himself sedately before the ikon, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver roubles and ten half-roubles; to Varvara he gave as much, and to Aksinya twenty quarter-roubles.  The chief charm of the present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched, were new and glittered in the sun.  Trying to seem grave and sedate he pursed up his face and puffed out his cheeks, and he smelt of spirits.  Probably he had visited the refreshment bar at every station.  And again there was a free-and-easiness about the man—­something superfluous and out of place.  Then Anisim had lunch and drank tea with the old man, and Varvara turned the new coins over in her hand and inquired about villagers who had gone to live in the town.

“They are all right, thank God, they get on quite well,” said Anisim.  “Only something has happened to Ivan Yegorov:  his old wife Sofya Nikiforovna is dead.  From consumption.  They ordered the memorial dinner for the peace of her soul at the confectioner’s at two and a half roubles a head.  And there was real wine.  Those who were peasants from our village—­they paid two and a half roubles for them, too.  They ate nothing, as though a peasant would understand sauce!”