first two or three weeks we did not see my uncle often. For days
together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the
heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his
table produced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick.
To us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed
simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did
not leave it till dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and
went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I
invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working.
The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over the
leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept moving
all over--swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum, whistling, and
nodding his head in time. He had an extremely careless and frivolous
expression all the while, as though he were not working, but playing at
noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a
jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of
delicate feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he
ate little.

"I can't make brother out!" mother complained of him. "Every day we kill
a turkey and pigeons on purpose for him, I make a _compote_ with my own
hands, and he eats a plateful of broth and a bit of meat the size of a
finger and gets up from the table. I begin begging him to eat; he comes
back and drinks a glass of milk. And what is there in that, in a glass
of milk? It's no better than washing up water! You may die of a diet
like that.... If I try to persuade him, he laughs and makes a joke of
it.... No; he does not care for our fare, poor dear!"

We spent the evenings far more gaily than the days. As a rule, by the
time the sun was setting and long shadows were lying across the yard,
we--that is, Tatyana Ivanovna, Pobyedimsky, and I--were sitting on
the steps of the lodge. We did not talk till it grew quite dusk. And,
indeed, what is one to talk of when every subject has been talked over
already? There was only one thing new, my uncle's arrival, and even that
subject was soon exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana
Ivanovna 's face, and frequently heaved deep sighs.... At the time I
did not understand those sighs, and did not try to fathom their
significance; now they explain a great deal to me.

When the shadows merged i