“Oh, my girl!” sighed Auntie, as Anna Akimovna ran into the dining-room and sat down beside her.  “You’ve frightened me to death!”

Every one in the house was pleased when Anna Akimovna was in good spirits and played pranks; this always reminded them that the old men were dead and that the old women had no authority in the house, and any one could do as he liked without any fear of being sharply called to account for it.  Only the two old women glanced askance at Anna Akimovna with amazement:  she was humming, and it was a sin to sing at table.

“Our mistress, our beauty, our picture,” Agafyushka began chanting with sugary sweetness.  “Our precious jewel!  The people, the people that have come to-day to look at our queen.  Lord have mercy upon us!  Generals, and officers and gentlemen. . . .  I kept looking out of window and counting and counting till I gave it up.”

“I’d as soon they did not come at all,” said Auntie; she looked sadly at her niece and added:  “They only waste the time for my poor orphan girl.”

Anna Akimovna felt hungry, as she had eaten nothing since the morning.  They poured her out some very bitter liqueur; she drank it off, and tasted the salt meat with mustard, and thought it extraordinarily nice.  Then the downstairs Masha brought in the turkey, the pickled apples and the gooseberries.  And that pleased her, too.  There was only one thing that was disagreeable:  there was a draught of hot air from the tiled stove; it was stiflingly close and every one’s cheeks were burning.  After supper the cloth was taken off and plates of peppermint biscuits, walnuts, and raisins were brought in.

“You sit down, too . . . no need to stand there!” said Auntie to the cook.

Agafyushka sighed and sat down to the table; Masha set a wineglass of liqueur before her, too, and Anna Akimovna began to feel as though Agafyushka’s white neck were giving out heat like the stove.  They were all talking of how difficult it was nowadays to get married, and saying that in old days, if men did not court beauty, they paid attention to money, but now there was no making out what they wanted; and while hunchbacks and cripples used to be left old maids, nowadays men would not have even the beautiful and wealthy.  Auntie began to set this down to immorality, and said that people had no fear of God, but she suddenly remembered that Ivan Ivanitch, her brother, and Varvarushka—­both people of holy life—­had feared God, but all the same had had children on the sly, and had sent them to the Foundling Asylum.  She pulled herself up and changed the conversation, telling them about a suitor she had once had, a factory hand, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had forced her to marry a widower, an ikon-painter, who, thank God, had died two years after.  The downstairs Masha sat down to the table, too, and told them with a mysterious air that for the last week some unknown man with a black moustache, in a great-coat with an astrachan collar, had made his appearance every morning in the yard, had stared at the windows of the big house, and had gone on further—­ to the buildings; the man was all right, nice-looking.