“Well, chuck it up then.  Let’s go and have some vodka!”

“Wait a little, maybe we shall catch something.  Towards evening the fish bite better . . . .  I’ve been sitting here, my boy, ever since the morning!  I can’t tell you how fearfully boring it is.  It was the devil drove me to take to this fishing!  I know that it is rotten idiocy for me to sit here.  I sit here like some scoundrel, like a convict, and I stare at the water like a fool.  I ought to go to the haymaking, but here I sit catching fish.  Yesterday His Holiness held a service at Haponyevo, but I didn’t go.  I spent the day here with this . . . with this she-devil.”

“But . . . have you taken leave of your senses?” asked Otsov, glancing in embarrassment at the Englishwoman.  “Using such language before a lady and she . . . .”

“Oh, confound her, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t understand a syllable of Russian, whether you praise her or blame her, it is all the same to her!  Just look at her nose!  Her nose alone is enough to make one faint.  We sit here for whole days together and not a single word!  She stands like a stuffed image and rolls the whites of her eyes at the water.”

The Englishwoman gave a yawn, put a new worm on, and dropped the hook into the water.

“I wonder at her not a little,” Gryabov went on, “the great stupid has been living in Russia for ten years and not a word of Russian! . . .  Any little aristocrat among us goes to them and learns to babble away in their lingo, while they . . . there’s no making them out.  Just look at her nose, do look at her nose!”

“Come, drop it . . . it’s uncomfortable.  Why attack a woman?”

“She’s not a woman, but a maiden lady. . . .  I bet she’s dreaming of suitors.  The ugly doll.  And she smells of something decaying . . . .  I’ve got a loathing for her, my boy!  I can’t look at her with indifference.  When she turns her ugly eyes on me it sends a twinge all through me as though I had knocked my elbow on the parapet.  She likes fishing too.  Watch her:  she fishes as though it were a holy rite!  She looks upon everything with disdain . . . .  She stands there, the wretch, and is conscious that she is a human being, and that therefore she is the monarch of nature.  And do you know what her name is?  Wilka Charlesovna Fyce!  Tfoo!  There is no getting it out!”

The Englishwoman, hearing her name, deliberately turned her nose in Gryabov’s direction and scanned him with a disdainful glance; she raised her eyes from Gryabov to Otsov and steeped him in disdain.  And all this in silence, with dignity and deliberation.

“Did you see?” said Gryabov chuckling.  “As though to say ’take that.’  Ah, you monster!  It’s only for the children’s sake that I keep that triton.  If it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t let her come within ten miles of my estate. . . .  She has got a nose like a hawk’s . . . and her figure!  That doll makes me think of a long nail, so I could take her, and knock her into the ground, you know.  Stay, I believe I have got a bite. . . .”