“Will it soon be over?” she asked, and in her voice she heard a peculiar and unfamiliar note which had never been there before.  “I must be dying in childbirth,” she thought.

Pyotr Dmitritch came cautiously into the bedroom, dressed for the day, and stood at the window with his back to his wife.  He lifted the blind and looked out of window.

“What rain!” he said.

“What time is it?” asked Olga Mihalovna, in order to hear the unfamiliar note in her voice again.

“A quarter to six,” answered the midwife.

“And what if I really am dying?” thought Olga Mihalovna, looking at her husband’s head and the window-panes on which the rain was beating.  “How will he live without me?  With whom will he have tea and dinner, talk in the evenings, sleep?”

And he seemed to her like a forlorn child; she felt sorry for him and wanted to say something nice, caressing and consolatory.  She remembered how in the spring he had meant to buy himself some harriers, and she, thinking it a cruel and dangerous sport, had prevented him from doing it.

“Pyotr, buy yourself harriers,” she moaned.

He dropped the blind and went up to the bed, and would have said something; but at that moment the pain came back, and Olga Mihalovna uttered an unseemly, piercing scream.

The pain and the constant screaming and moaning stupefied her.  She heard, saw, and sometimes spoke, but hardly understood anything, and was only conscious that she was in pain or was just going to be in pain.  It seemed to her that the nameday party had been long, long ago—­not yesterday, but a year ago perhaps; and that her new life of agony had lasted longer than her childhood, her school-days, her time at the University, and her marriage, and would go on for a long, long time, endlessly.  She saw them bring tea to the midwife, and summon her at midday to lunch and afterwards to dinner; she saw Pyotr Dmitritch grow used to coming in, standing for long intervals by the window, and going out again; saw strange men, the maid, Varvara, come in as though they were at home. . . .  Varvara said nothing but, “He will, he will,” and was angry when any one closed the drawers and the chest.  Olga Mihalovna saw the light change in the room and in the windows:  at one time it was twilight, then thick like fog, then bright daylight as it had been at dinner-time the day before, then again twilight . . . and each of these changes lasted as long as her childhood, her school-days, her life at the University. . . .

In the evening two doctors—­one bony, bald, with a big red beard; the other with a swarthy Jewish face and cheap spectacles—­performed some sort of operation on Olga Mihalovna.  To these unknown men touching her body she felt utterly indifferent.  By now she had no feeling of shame, no will, and any one might do what he would with her.  If any one had rushed at her with a knife, or had insulted Pyotr Dmitritch, or had robbed her of her right to the little creature, she would not have said a word.