A bright spring day was fading into evening.
High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds
seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking
into its depths of blue.
In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets
of the government town of O—— (it
was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an
open window; one was about fifty, the other an old
lady of seventy.
The name of the former was Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin.
Her husband, a shrewd determined man of obstinate
bilious temperament, had been dead for ten years.
He had been a provincial public prosecutor, noted in
his own day as a successful man of business.
He had received a fair education and had been to the
university; but having been born in narrow circumstances
he realized early in life the necessity of pushing
his own way in the world and making money. It
had been a love-match on Marya Dmitrievna’s
side. He was not bad-looking, was clever and could
be very agreeable when he chose. Marya Dmitrievna
Pesto—that was her maiden name—had
lost her parents in childhood. She spent some
years in a boarding-school in Moscow, and after leaving
school, lived on the family estate of Pokrovskoe,
about forty miles from O——, with
her aunt and her elder brother. This brother
soon after obtained a post in Petersburg, and made
them a scanty allowance. He treated his aunt and
sister very shabbily till his sudden death cut short
his career. Marya Dmitrievna inherited Pokrovskoe,
but she did not live there long. Two years after
her marriage with Kalitin, who succeeded in winning
her heart in a few days, Pokrovskoe was exchanged
for another estate, which yielded a much larger income,
but was utterly unattractive and had no house.
At the same time Kalitin took a house in the town of
O——, in which he and his wife took
up their permanent abode. There was a large garden
round the house, which on one side looked out upon
the open country away from the town.
“And so,” decided Kalitin, who had a great
distaste for the quiet of country life, “there
would be no need for them to be dragging themselves
off into the country.” In her heart Marya
Dmitrievna more than once regretted her pretty Pokrovskoe,
with its babbling brook, its wide meadows, and green
copses; but she never opposed her husband in anything
and had the greatest veneration for his wisdom and
knowledge of the world. When after fifteen years
of married life he died leaving her with a son and
two daughters, Marya Dmitrievna had grown so accustomed
to her house and to town life that she had no inclination
to leave O——.
