“Why are Marfinka’s eyes red? Has she been crying?” Tatiana Markovna inquired anxiously of the maid. “The sun has dazzled her. Are her curtains well drawn, you careless girl? I must see.”
In the maid’s room sat three or four young girls who sat all day long sewing, or making bobbin lace, without once stretching their limbs all day, because the mistress did not like to see idle hands. In the ante-room there sat idly the melancholy Yakob, Egorka, who was sixteen and always laughing, with two or three lackeys. Yakob did nothing but wait at table, where he idly flicked away the flies, and as idly changed the plates. He was almost too idle to speak, and when the visitors addressed him he answered in a tone indicating excessive boredom or a guilty conscience. Because he was quiet, never seriously drunk, and did not smoke, his master had made him butler; he was also very zealous at church.
{1} Tatiana Markovna was addressed by her grand-nieces and her grand-nephew as Grandmother.
CHAPTER III
Boris came in on his aunt during the children’s breakfast. Tatiana Markovna clapped her hands and all but jumped from her chair; the plates were nearly shaken off the table.
“Borushka, tiresome boy! You have not even written, but descend like a thunderclap. How you frightened me!”
She took his head in her hands, looked for a full minute into his face, and would have wept, but she glanced away at his mother’s portrait, and sighed.
“Well, well!” she seemed to say, but in fact said nothing, but smiled and wiped away her tears with her handkerchief. “Your mother’s boy,” she cried, “her very image! See how lovely she was, look, Vassilissa! Do you remember? Isn’t he like her?”