Anna Akimovna disliked and feared those huge dark buildings, warehouses, and barracks where the workmen lived.  She had only once been in the main building since her father’s death.  The high ceilings with iron girders; the multitude of huge, rapidly turning wheels, connecting straps and levers; the shrill hissing; the clank of steel; the rattle of the trolleys; the harsh puffing of steam; the faces—­pale, crimson, or black with coal-dust; the shirts soaked with sweat; the gleam of steel, of copper, and of fire; the smell of oil and coal; and the draught, at times very hot and at times very cold—­gave her an impression of hell.  It seemed to her as though the wheels, the levers, and the hot hissing cylinders were trying to tear themselves away from their fastenings to crush the men, while the men, not hearing one another, ran about with anxious faces, and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop their terrible movement.  They showed Anna Akimovna something and respectfully explained it to her.  She remembered how in the forge a piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an old man with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a blue shirt with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably one of the foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how the golden sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a little afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet-iron with a clang.  The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the young man had wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something to her.  And she remembered, too, how in another department an old man with one eye had been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron filings were scattered about; and how a red-haired man in black spectacles, with holes in his shirt, had been working at a lathe, making something out of a piece of steel:  the lathe roared and hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt sick at the sound, and it seemed as though they were boring into her ears.  She looked, listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and felt ashamed.  To get hundreds of thousands of roubles from a business which one does not understand and cannot like—­how strange it is!

And she had not once been in the workpeople’s barracks.  There, she was told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy.  It was an astonishing thing:  a thousand roubles were spent annually on keeping the barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the anonymous letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse and worse every year.

“There was more order in my father’s day,” thought Anna Akimovna, as she drove out of the yard, “because he had been a workman himself.  I know nothing about it and only do silly things.”