ay 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.

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