They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress.  The company consists of five people.  The proprietress herself, in whose name the house is registered, is Anna Markovna.  She is about sixty.  She is very small of stature, but dumpy:  she may be visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft, gelatinous globes—­large, medium and small, pressed into each other without any interstices; this—­her skirt, torso and head.  Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a raspberry colour, impotently hanging down.  Her husband—­Isaiah Savvich—­is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man.  He is under his wife’s thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper.  In order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and craving some maudlin tears.

Then, there are the two housekeepers—­senior and junior.  The senior is Emma Edwardovna.  She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins.  Her eyes are encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin.  The face broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and is of an earthen colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression of the face calmly authoritative.  It is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a year or two Anna Markovna will go into retirement, and sell her the establishment with all its rights and furnishings, when she will receive part in cash, and part on terms—­by promissory note.  Because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress and fear her somewhat.  Those who fall into error she beats with her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without changing the calm expression of her face.  Among the girls there is always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting love and fantastic jealousy.  And this is far harder than her beatings.

The other one is called Zociya.  She has just struggled out of the ranks of the common girls.  The girls, as yet, call her impersonally, flatteringly and familiarly, “little housekeeper.”  She is spare, spry, just a trifle squinting, with a rosy complexion, and hair dressed in a little curly pompadour; she adores actors—­preferably stout comedians.  Toward Emma Edwardovna she is ingratiating.

The fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector, Kerbesh.  This is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red beard like a fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin, slightly hoarse, pleasant voice.  Everybody knows that he formerly served in the secret service division and was the terror of crooks, thanks to his terrible physical strength and cruelty in interrogations.