"Why, you heard that the cook has gone to buy a coffin."
"She cooks the dinner," I thought, "and her hands are always so clean and her clothes so neat.... I should like to see her there at work in the kitchen.... She is an extraordinary girl!"
I remember another conversation at the fence. That time Raissa brought with her her little deaf and dumb sister. She was a pretty child with immense, astonished-looking eyes and a perfect mass of dull, black hair on her little, head (Raissa's hair, too, was black and hers, too, was without lustre). Latkin had by then been struck down by paralysis.
"I really don't know what to do," Raissa began. "The doctor has written a prescription. We must go to the chemist's; and our peasant (Latkin had still one serf) has brought us wood from the village and a goose. And the porter has taken it away, 'you are in debt to me,' he said."
"Taken the goose?" asked David.
"No, not the goose. He says it is an old one; it is no good for anything; he says that is why our peasant brought it us, but he is taking the wood."
"But he has no right to," exclaimed David.
"He has no right to, but he has taken it. I went up to the garret, there we have got a very, very old trunk. I began rummaging in it and what do you think I found? Look!"
She took from under her kerchief a rather large field glass in a copper setting, covered with morocco, yellow with age. David, as a connoisseur of all sorts of instruments, seized upon it at once.
"It's English," he pronounced, putting it first to one eye and then to the other. "A marine glass."