So passed a year, at the end of which a little incident befell Gerasim.

The old lady, in whose service he lived as porter, adhered in everything to the ancient ways, and kept a large number of servants.  In her house were not only laundresses, sempstresses, carpenters, tailors and tailoresses, there was even a harness-maker—­he was reckoned as a veterinary surgeon, too,—­and a doctor for the servants; there was a household doctor for the mistress; there was, lastly, a shoemaker, by name Kapiton Klimov, a sad drunkard.  Klimov regarded himself as an injured creature, whose merits were unappreciated, a cultivated man from Petersburg, who ought not to be living in Moscow without occupation—­in the wilds, so to speak; and if he drank, as he himself expressed it emphatically, with a blow on his chest, it was sorrow drove him to it.  So one day his mistress had a conversation about him with her head steward, Gavrila, a man whom, judging solely from his little yellow eyes and nose like a duck’s beak, fate itself, it seemed, had marked out as a person in authority.  The lady expressed her regret at the corruption of the morals of Kapiton, who had, only the evening before, been picked up somewhere in the street.

“Now, Gavrila,” she observed, all of a sudden, “now, if we were to marry him, what do you think, perhaps he would be steadier?”

“Why not marry him, indeed, ’m?  He could be married, ’m,” answered Gavrila, “and it would be a very good thing, to be sure, ’m.”

“Yes; only who is to marry him?”

“Ay, ’m.  But that’s at your pleasure, ’m.  He may, any way, so to say, be wanted for something; he can’t be turned adrift altogether.”

“I fancy he likes Tatiana.”

Gavrila was on the point of making some reply, but he shut his lips tightly.

“Yes! . . . let him marry Tatiana,” the lady decided, taking a pinch of snuff complacently, “Do you hear?”

“Yes, ’m,” Gavrila articulated, and he withdrew.

Returning to his own room (it was in a little lodge, and was almost filled up with metal-bound trunks), Gavrila first sent his wife away, and then sat down at the window and pondered.  His mistress’s unexpected arrangement had clearly put him in a difficulty.  At last he got up and sent to call Kapiton.  Kapiton made his appearance. . .  But before reporting their conversation to the reader, we consider it not out of place to relate in few words who was this Tatiana, whom it was to be Kapiton’s lot to marry, and why the great lady’s order had disturbed the steward.

Tatiana, one of the laundresses referred to above (as a trained and skilful laundress she was in charge of the fine linen only), was a woman of twenty-eight, thin, fair-haired, with moles on her left cheek.  Moles on the left cheek are regarded as of evil omen in Russia—­a token of unhappy life. . .  Tatiana could not boast of her good luck.  From her earliest youth she had been badly treated; she