f her reign. He lived alone with his wife, Malanya Pavlovna; she was
ten years younger than he. They had had two daughters who had been
married long before, and rarely visited Sukhodol; there had been
quarrels between them and their parents,[28] and Alexyei Sergyeitch
hardly ever mentioned them.

I see that ancient, truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me
now. Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning
of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams--such beams
were brought at that epoch from the Zhizdrin pine forests; there is no
trace of them nowadays!--it was very spacious and contained a multitude
of rooms, which were decidedly low-ceiled and dark, it is true, and the
windows were mere slits in the walls, for the sake of warmth. As was
proper, the offices and the house-serfs' cottages surrounded the
manor-house on all sides, and a park adjoined it, small but with fine
fruit-trees, pellucid apples and seedless pears; for ten versts round
about stretched out the flat, black-loam steppe. There was no lofty
object for the eye: neither a tree nor a belfry; only here and there a
windmill reared itself aloft with holes in its wings; it was a regular
Sukhodol! (Dry Valley). Inside the house the rooms were filled with
ordinary, plain furniture; rather unusual was a verst-post which stood
on a window-sill in the hall, and bore the following inscription:

"If thou walkest 68 times around this hall,[30] thou wilt have gone a
verst; if thou goest 87 times from the extreme corner of the
drawing-room to the right corner of the billiard-room, thou wilt have
gone a verst,"--and so forth. But what most impressed the guest who
arrived for the first time was the great number of pictures hung on the
walls, for the most part the work of so-called Italian masters: ancient
landscapes, and mythological and religious subjects. But as all these
pictures had turned very black, and had even become warped, all that met
the eye was patches of flesh-colour, or a billowy red drapery on an
invisible body--or an arch which seemed suspended in the air, or a
dishevelled tree with blue foliage, or the bosom of a nymph with a large
nipple, like the cover of a soup-tureen; a sliced watermelon, with black
seeds; a turban, with a feather above a horse's head; or the gigantic,
light-brown leg of some apostle or other, with a muscular calf and
up-turned toes, suddenly protruded itself. In the drawing-room, in the