The happy pair were left alone.  Modest Alexeitch looked about the compartment, arranged their things on the shelves, and sat down, smiling, opposite his young wife.  He was an official of medium height, rather stout and puffy, who looked exceedingly well nourished, with long whiskers and no moustache.  His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot.  The most characteristic point in his face was the absence of moustache, the bare, freshly shaven place, which gradually passed into the fat cheeks, quivering like jelly.  His deportment was dignified, his movements were deliberate, his manner was soft.

“I cannot help remembering now one circumstance,” he said, smiling.  “When, five years ago, Kosorotov received the order of St. Anna of the second grade, and went to thank His Excellency, His Excellency expressed himself as follows:  ’So now you have three Annas:  one in your buttonhole and two on your neck.’  And it must be explained that at that time Kosorotov’s wife, a quarrelsome and frivolous person, had just returned to him, and that her name was Anna.  I trust that when I receive the Anna of the second grade His Excellency will not have occasion to say the same thing to me.”

He smiled with his little eyes.  And she, too, smiled, troubled at the thought that at any moment this man might kiss her with his thick damp lips, and that she had no right to prevent his doing so.  The soft movements of his fat person frightened her; she felt both fear and disgust.  He got up, without haste took off the order from his neck, took off his coat and waistcoat, and put on his dressing-gown.

“That’s better,” he said, sitting down beside Anna.

Anna remembered what agony the wedding had been, when it had seemed to her that the priest, and the guests, and every one in church had been looking at her sorrowfully and asking why, why was she, such a sweet, nice girl, marrying such an elderly, uninteresting gentleman.  Only that morning she was delighted that everything had been satisfactorily arranged, but at the time of the wedding, and now in the railway carriage, she felt cheated, guilty, and ridiculous.  Here she had married a rich man and yet she had no money, her wedding-dress had been bought on credit, and when her father and brothers had been saying good-bye, she could see from their faces that they had not a farthing.  Would they have any supper that day?  And tomorrow?  And for some reason it seemed to her that her father and the boys were sitting tonight hungry without her, and feeling the same misery as they had the day after their mother’s funeral.

“Oh, how unhappy I am!” she thought.  “Why am I so unhappy?”