XIX
Glasha soon overtakes her. With an exaggerated loudness she runs stamping down the stairs, showing a wing-like glimmer of her strong legs from under the pink skirt, set a-flutter by her vigorous movement. She calls out in a clear, solicitously joyous voice:
“Barinya, you have come out! The sun will scorch you. I’ve fetched your hat.”
The yellow straw hat, with its lavender ribbon, glimmers in Glasha’s hands like some strange, low-fluttering bird.
Elena Kirillovna, as she puts the hat on, says: “Why do you run about in such disorder! You ought to tidy yourself—you know whom we are expecting.”
Glasha is silent, and her face assumes a compassionate expression. For a long time she looks after her strolling mistress, then she smiles and walks back.
Stepanida asks her in a loud whisper: “Well, is she still expecting her grandson?”
“Rather!” Glasha replies compassionately. “And it’s simply pitiful to look at them. They never stop thinking about him.”
In the meanwhile Elena Kirillovna makes her way across the vegetable garden, past the labourers and the servants in the stockyard, and then across the field. Near the garden fence she enters the road.
There, not far from the garden, in the shade of an old, spreading lime, stands a bench—a board upon two supports, which still shows traces of having been once painted green. From this place a view is to be had of the road, of the garden, and of the house.