side with softened
faces as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance
about them both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they
drank tea, with fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterwards
they ate pie. Every day at twelve o'clock there was a savoury smell
of beet-root soup and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on
fast-days of fish, and no one could pass the gate without feeling
hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers
were regaled with tea and cracknels. Once a week the couple went
to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face.

"Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God," Olenka used to
say to her acquaintances. "I wish every one were as well off as
Vassitchka and I."

When Pustovalov went away to buy wood in the Mogilev district, she
missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. A young veterinary
surgeon in the army, called Smirnin, to whom they had let their
lodge, used sometimes to come in in the evening. He used to talk
to her and play cards with her, and this entertained her in her
husband's absence. She was particularly interested in what he told
her of his home life. He was married and had a little boy, but was
separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and
now he hated her and used to send her forty roubles a month for the
maintenance of their son. And hearing of all this, Olenka sighed
and shook her head. She was sorry for him.

"Well, God keep you," she used to say to him at parting, as she
lighted him down the stairs with a candle. "Thank you for coming
to cheer me up, and may the Mother of God give you health."

And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and
dignity, the same reasonableness, in imitation of her husband. As
the veterinary surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she
would say:

"You know, Vladimir Platonitch, you'd better make it up with your
wife. You should forgive her for the sake of your son. You may be
sure the little fellow understands."

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about
the veterinary surgeon and his unhappy home life, and both sighed
and shook their heads and talked about the boy, who, no doubt,
missed his father, and by some strange connection of ideas, they
went up to the holy ikons, bowed to the ground before them and
prayed that God would give them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived for six years quietly an