The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side; the yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten faintly.  The stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday’s odour; it smells of perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a large uninhabited room, the perspiration of unclean and unhealthy feminine flesh, face-powder, boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of the yellow mastic with which the parquet floor had been polished yesterday.  And with a strange charm the smell of withering swamp grass is blended with these smells.  To-day is Trinity.  In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about—­in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room.  They, also, had lit the lamps before all the images.  The girls, by tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have been denied during the night.

And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is carved in the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees.  And so with all the houses—­the thin white trunks with their scant dying verdure adorn the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and doors.

The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy.  The chopping of cutlets for dinner can be heard from the kitchen.  Liubka, one of the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner court.  Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but no one had remained for the night with her, and because of that she had slept her fill—­splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon a wide bed.  She had risen early, at ten o’clock, and had with pleasure helped the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the kitchen.  Now she is feeding the chained dog Amour with the sinews and cuttings of the meat.  The big, rusty hound, with long glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl—­with his front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling in the throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles his nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement.  But she, teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity: 

“There, you—­stupid!  I’ll—­I’ll give it to you!  How dare you?”

But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of Amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had slept her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of the Trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her to see.

All the night guests have already gone their ways.  The most business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.