call: "Hello!" "Genya!"
or "Mamma, dear, where are you?" They always prayed together and shared
the same faith, and they understood each other very well, even when they
were silent. And they treated other people in exactly the same way.
Ekaterina Pavlovna also soon got used to me and became attached to me,
and when I did not turn up for a few days she would send to inquire if I
was well. And she too used to look admiringly at my sketches, and with
the same frank loquacity she would tell me things that happened, and she
would confide her domestic secrets to me.

She revered her elder daughter. Lyda never came to her for caresses, and
only talked about serious things: she went her own way and to her mother
and sister she was as sacred and enigmatic as the admiral, sitting in
his cabin, to his sailors.

"Our Lyda is a remarkable person," her mother would often say; "isn't
she?"

And, now, as the soft rain fell, we spoke of Lyda:

"She is a remarkable woman," said her mother, and added in a low voice
like a conspirator's as she looked round, "such as she have to be looked
for with a lamp in broad daylight, though you know, I am beginning to be
anxious. The school, pharmacies, books--all very well, but why go to
such extremes? She is twenty-three and it is time for her to think
seriously about herself. If she goes on with her books and her
pharmacies she won't know how life has passed.... She ought to marry."

Genya, pale with reading, and with her hair ruffled, looked up and said,
as if to herself, as she glanced at her mother:

"Mamma, dear, everything depends on the will of God."

And once more she plunged into her book.

Bielokurov came over in a _poddiovka_, wearing an embroidered shirt. We
played croquet and lawn-tennis, and when it grew dark we had a long
supper, and Lyda once more spoke of her schools and Balaguin, who had
got the whole district into his own hands. As I left the Volchaninovs
that night I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day, with a
sad consciousness that everything ends, however long it may be. Genya
took me to the gate, and perhaps, because she had spent the whole day
with me from the beginning to end, I felt somehow lonely without her,
and the whole kindly family was dear to me: and for the first time
during the whole of that summer I had a desire to work.

"Tell me why you lead such a monotonous life," I asked Bielokurov, as we
went home. "My life is tedious, dull, monoton