Excuse me, reader, for introducing you to such company.  Nevertheless, if the cords of love and compassion have not wholly snapped in your soul, you will find, even in that maidservants’ room, something which may cause them to vibrate again.

So, whether you please to follow me or not, I will return to the alcove on the staircase whence I was able to observe all that passed in that room.  From my post I could see the stove-couch, with, upon it, an iron, an old cap-stand with its peg bent crooked, a wash-tub, and a basin.  There, too, was the window, with, in fine disorder before it, a piece of black wax, some fragments of silk, a half-eaten cucumber, a box of sweets, and so on.  There, too, was the large table at which she used to sit in the pink cotton dress which I admired so much and the blue handkerchief which always caught my attention so.  She would be sewing-though interrupting her work at intervals to scratch her head a little, to bite the end of her thread, or to snuff the candle—­and I would think to myself:  “Why was she not born a lady—­she with her blue eyes, beautiful fair hair, and magnificent bust?  How splendid she would look if she were sitting in a drawing-room and dressed in a cap with pink ribbons and a silk gown—­not one like Mimi’s, but one like the gown which I saw the other day on the Tverski Boulevard!” Yes, she would work at the embroidery-frame, and I would sit and look at her in the mirror, and be ready to do whatsoever she wanted—­to help her on with her mantle or to hand her food.  As for Basil’s drunken face and horrid figure in the scanty coat with the red shirt showing beneath it, well, in his every gesture, in his every movement of his back, I seemed always to see signs of the humiliating chastisements which he had undergone.

“Ah, Basil!  Again?” cried Masha on one occasion as she stuck her needle into the pincushion, but without looking up at the person who was entering.

“What is the good of a man like him?” was Basil’s first remark.

“Yes.  If only he would say something decisive!  But I am powerless in the matter—­I am all at odds and ends, and through his fault, too.”

“Will you have some tea?” put in Madesha (another servant).

“No, thank you.—­But why does he hate me so, that old thief of an uncle of yours?  Why?  Is it because of the clothes I wear, or of my height, or of my walk, or what?  Well, damn and confound him!” finished Basil, snapping his fingers.

“We must be patient,” said Masha, threading her needle.

“You are so—­”

“It is my nerves that won’t stand it, that’s all.”

At this moment the door of Grandmamma’s room banged, and Gasha’s angry voice could be heard as she came up the stairs.

“There!” she muttered with a gesture of her hands.  “Try to please people when even they themselves do not know what they want, and it is a cursed life—­sheer hard labour, and nothing else!  If only a certain thing would happen!—­though God forgive me for thinking it!”