He was a widower, but a year after his son’s marriage he could not resist getting married himself.  A girl was found for him, living twenty miles from Ukleevo, called Varvara Nikolaevna, no longer quite young, but good-looking, comely, and belonging to a decent family.  As soon as she was installed into the upper-storey room everything in the house seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the windows.  The lamps gleamed before the ikons, the tables were covered with snow-white cloths, flowers with red buds made their appearance in the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him.  Varvara Nikolaevna had a pleasant, friendly smile, and it seemed as though the whole house were smiling, too.  Beggars and pilgrims, male and female, began to come into the yard, a thing which had never happened in the past; the plaintive sing-song voices of the Ukleevo peasant women and the apologetic coughs of weak, seedy-looking men, who had been dismissed from the factory for drunkenness were heard under the windows.  Varvara helped them with money, with bread, with old clothes, and afterwards, when she felt more at home, began taking things out of the shop.  One day the deaf man saw her take four ounces of tea and that disturbed him.

“Here, mother’s taken four ounces of tea,” he informed his father afterwards; “where is that to be entered?”

The old man made no reply but stood still and thought a moment, moving his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.

“Varvarushka, if you want anything out of the shop,” he said affectionately, “take it, my dea r.  Take it and welcome; don’t hesitate.”

And the next day the deaf man, running across the yard, called to her: 

“If there is anything you want, mother, take it.”

There was something new, something gay and light-hearted in her giving of alms, just as there was in the lamps before the ikons and in the red flowers.  When at Carnival or at the church festival, which lasted for three days, they sold the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and their wives’ kerchiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory hands stupefied with bad vodka lay rolling in the mud, and sin seemed to hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a relief to think that up there in the house there was a gentle, neatly dressed woman who had nothing to do with salt meat or vodka; her charity had in those burdensome, murky days the effect of a safety valve in a machine.