After we had heard a detailed history of the Gundasovs, there followed a fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been accustomed to see only before Christmas and Easter.  The sky above and the water in the river were all that escaped; everything else was subjected to a merciless cleansing, scrubbing, painting.  If the sky had been lower and smaller and the river had not flowed so swiftly, they would have scoured them, too, with bath-brick and rubbed them, too, with tow.  Our walls were as white as snow, but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and shining, but they were washed every day.  The cat Bobtail (as a small child I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for chopping the sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was carried off to the kitchen and put in charge of Anisya; Fedka was told that if any of the dogs came near the front-door “God would punish him.”  But no one was so badly treated as the poor sofas, easy-chairs, and rugs!  They had never, before been so violently beaten as on this occasion in preparation for our visitor.  My pigeons took fright at the loud thud of the sticks, and were continually flying up into the sky.

The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole district who ventured to make for the gentry, came over from Novostroevka.  He was a hard-working capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain fancy and feeling for form, but yet he was an atrocious tailor.  His work was ruined by hesitation....  The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque.  We cut a dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence of young ladies.

This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure.  He measured me all over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put hoops round me like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting down my measurements with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and ticked off all the measurements with triangular signs.  When he had finished with me he set to work on my tutor, Yegor Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky.  My beloved tutor was then at the stage when young men watch the growth of their moustache and are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe with which Spiridon approached him.  Yegor Alexyevitch had to throw back his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V, first lift up his arms, then let them fall.  Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him during the process like a love-sick pigeon round its mate, going down on one knee, bending double....  My mother, weary, exhausted by her exertions and heated by ironing, watched these lengthy proceedings, and said: 

“Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you spoil the cloth!  And it will be the worse for you if you don’t make them fit!”