ted. He came, not alone, but with his sister Varinka. He was
a tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one could see from his face
that he had a bass voice, and, in fact, he had a voice that seemed to
come out of a barrel--'boom, boom, boom!' And she was not so young,
about thirty, but she, too, was tall, well-made, with black eyebrows and
red cheeks--in fact, she was a regular sugar-plum, and so sprightly, so
noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing. For the
least thing she would go off into a ringing laugh--'Ha-ha-ha!' We made
our first thorough acquaintance with the Kovalenkos at the headmaster's
name-day party. Among the glum and intensely bored teachers who came
even to the name-day party as a duty we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite
risen from the waves; she walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang,
danced.... She sang with feeling 'The Winds do Blow,' then another song,
and another, and she fascinated us all--all, even Byelikov. He sat down
by her and said with a honeyed smile:

"'The Little Russian reminds one of the ancient Greek in its softness
and agreeable resonance.'

"That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and
earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district, and that
her mamma lived at the farm, and that they had such pears, such melons,
such _kabaks_! The Little Russians call pumpkins _kabaks_ (i.e.,
pothouses), while their pothouses they call _shinki_, and they make
a beetroot soup with tomatoes and aubergines in it, 'which was so
nice--awfully nice!'

"We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us
all:

"'It would be a good thing to make a match of it,' the headmaster's
wife said to me softly.

"We all for some reason recalled the fact that our friend Byelikov was
not married, and it now seemed to us strange that we had hitherto
failed to observe, and had in fact completely lost sight of, a detail
so important in his life. What was his attitude to woman? How had he
settled this vital question for himself? This had not interested us in
the least till then; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a
man who went out in all weathers in goloshes and slept under curtains
could be in love.

"'He is a good deal over forty and she is thirty,' the headmaster's
wife went on, developing her idea. 'I believe she would marry him.'

"All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom, all
sorts of unnecessary and n