"What's the matter?... Tea's ready?.. I'll have my tea here!... Where do you want me to go and get it?" he asked, with a frown.
"Come, we'll drink our tea together," she proposed, looking at him with her grey smiling eyes.
Grigori turned away, and replied in a curt voice that he would come directly.
As she left the room he stretched himself once more in his bunk and began to brood.
"Yes ... she calls me to tea ... and is as pleasant as possible! She has grown thinner too in these last few days...."
He felt pity for her, and would have liked to have prepared an agreeable surprise for her, perhaps to have bought some cakes or something of that sort to eat with their tea. But whilst he was washing he put these thoughts away.... "Why should he spoil his wife?... She could get on very well without it!"
They drank their tea in a small bright room, the two windows of which looked out on to the open fields. The gilded rays of the morning sun lay on the floor. Dew still sparkled on the grass under the window. Along the distant horizon could be just seen through a light opal morning mist the trees that bordered the high-road. The sky was cloudless, and a fresh smell of grass and of damp earth was waited in at the open windows.
The table stood just between the two windows, and three people sat down to it; Grigori, Matrona, and a companion of the latter, a tall, thin, middle-aged person, with a pock-marked face and good-tempered grey eyes. She was called Felizata Jegorovna, and she was a spinster and the daughter of a college superintendent She could not drink the tea provided by the Infirmary, and so used her own samovar. All this she told Orloff in an excited cracked voice; she invited him hospitably to take a seat near the window, and to refresh himself with the "magnificent air of Heaven," whilst she disappeared somewhere for a time.
"Well, were you very tired yesterday?" Orloff asked his wife.
"I should rather think so," Matrona replied in a lively tone of voice. "I could scarcely feel my legs under me, and my head was swimming. I moved about at last as if I were half dead, and could scarcely hold on till I was released from duty.... I was praying all the time to the Lord that He would be merciful to us."