she
had said something improper during the day, and disgust at her own
lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely. She took up a candle
and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran downstairs,
woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been joking. Then
she went to her bedroom. Red-haired Masha, who was dozing in an
arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the pillows.
Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had
fallen on one side.

"Tchalikov came again this evening," she said, yawning, "but I did
not dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come
again tomorrow."

"What does he want with me?" said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her
comb on the floor. "I won't see him, I won't."

She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov,
that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her
every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. So all she was
fit for was to help the poor. Oh, how stupid it was!

She lay down without undressing, and sobbed with shame and depression:
what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her
dreams that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honourable,
but at the same time she felt that Lysevitch and even Krylin were
nearer to her than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together.
She thought that if the long day she had just spent could have been
represented in a picture, all that had been bad and vulgar--as,
for instance, the dinner, the lawyer's talk, the game of "kings"
--would have been true, while her dreams and talk about Pimenov
would have stood out from the whole as something false, as out of
drawing; and she thought, too, that it was too late to dream of
happiness, that everything was over for her, and it was impossible
to go back to the life when she had slept under the same quilt with
her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.

Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in
mournful perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face
against her mistress's arm, and without words it was clear why she
was so wretched.

"We are fools!" said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. "We are
fools! Oh, what fools we are!"

A PROBLEM

THE strictest measures were taken that the Uskovs' family secret
might not leak out and become generally known. Half of the servants
were sent off to the theatre or the circus; the other half were