"Perhaps you'll have one more little glass for a stirrup cup?" the
nearly blind Isaiah Savvich thrusts himself over the table.

"Tha-ank you. I can't. Full to the gills. Honoured, I'm sure! ..."

"Thanks for your company. Drop in some time."

"Always glad to be your guest, sir. Au revoir!"

But in the doorway he stops for a minute and says significantly:

"But still, my advice to you is--you'd better pass this girl on to some
place or other in good time. Of course, it's your affair, but as a good
friend of yours I give you warning."

He goes away. When his steps are abating on the stairs and the front
door bangs to behind him, Emma Edwardovna snorts through her nose and
says contemptuously:

"Stool-pigeon! He wants to take money both here and there..."

Little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. It is dark in
the house. It smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. Quiet reigns.

CHAPTER III.

Until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time drags
endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. And, in general, this
daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the life of the house.
It remotely resembles in its moods those slothful, empty hours which
are lived through during the great holidays in scholastic institutes
and other private institutions for females, when all the friends have
dispersed, when there is much leisure and much indolence, and a
radiant, agreeable tedium reigns the whole day. In only their
petticoats and white shifts, with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the
women aimlessly ramble from room to room, all of them unwashed,
uncombed; lazily strike the keys of the old pianoforte with the index
finger, lazily lay out cards to tell their fortune, lazily exchange
curses, and with a languishing irritation await the evening.

Liubka, after breakfast, had carried out the leavings of bread and the
cuttings of ham to Amour, but the dog had soon palled upon her.
Together with Niura she had bought some barberry bon-bons and sunflower
seeds, and now both are standing behind the fence separating the house
from the street, gnawing the seeds, the shells of which remain on their
chins and bosoms, and speculate indifferently about those who pass on
the street: about the lamp-lighter, pouring kerosene into the street
lamps, about the policeman with the daily registry book under his arm,
about the housekeeper from somebody else's establishment, running
across the road to t