A silence followed—Stepa yawned loudly as he contemplated the Chinaman on the tea-caddy whom he had seen at least a thousand times before. Markovna and the two aunts sipped their tea primly from their saucers. The air was close and oppressive with the heat of the stove. The lassitude that comes to the satiated body when it is forced to continue eating was depicted on the faces and in the movements of the family. The samovar had been taken away and the table had been cleared, but they still continued to sit about the board. Pelagia Ivanovna jumped up from time to time and ran into the kitchen with a look of horror on her face to confer with the cook about supper. The aunts both sat motionless in the same position, dozing with their hands folded on their chests and their lack-lustre eyes fixed on the lamp. Markovna kept hiccoughing every minute and asked each time:
“I wonder what makes me hiccough? I don’t know what I could have eaten or drunk—hick!”
Pavel Vasilitch and Stepa leaned over the table side by side with their heads together, poring over the pages of the Neva Magazine for the year 1878.
“‘The monument to Leonardo da Vinci in front of the Victor Emmanuel Museum at Milan.’ Look at that, it’s like a triumphal arch! And there are a man and a lady, and there are some more little people——”
“That looks like one of the boys at our school,” Stepa said.
“Turn over the page—‘The Proboscis of the House Fly as Seen through the Microscope.’ Goodness what a fly! I wonder what a bedbug would look like under the microscope, eh? How disgusting!”
The ancient hall clock coughed rather than struck ten times, as if it were afflicted with a cold. Into the dining-room came Anna the cook and fell flop at her master’s feet.
“Forgive me my sins, master, for Christ’s sake!” she cried and got up again very red in the face.
“Forgive me mine, too, for Christ’s sake!” answered Pavel Vasilitch calmly.
Anna then fell down at the feet of every member of the family in turn and asked forgiveness for her sins, omitting only Markovna, who, not being high-born, was unworthy of a prostration.