"Good day, Yakov Vasilitch."
With a good-humoured glance in response, and his mouth open, Gubin waved a hand in greeting:
"Good day to YOU, Nadezhda Ivanovna," he replied. "How are you this morning?"
Somehow this made her blush, and cross her arms upon her ample bosom, while her kindly, rounded, eminently Russian face evinced the ghost of a shy smile. At the same time, it was a face wherein not a single feature was of a kind to remain fixed in the memory, a face as vacant as though nature had forgotten to stamp thereon a single wish. Hence, even when the woman smiled there seemed to remain a doubt whether the smile had really materialised.
"How is Natalia Vasilievna?" continued Gubin.
"Much as usual," the woman answered softly.
Whereafter hesitantly, and with downcast eyes, she essayed to cross the courtyard. As she passed me I caught a whiff of raspberries and currants.
Disappearing into the grey mist through a small door with iron staples, she soon reissued thence with a hencoop, and, seating herself on the steps of the doorway, and setting the coop on her knees, took between her two large palms some fluttering, chirping, downy, golden chicks, and raised them to her ruddy lips and cheeks with a murmur of:
"Oh my little darlings! Oh my little darlings!"
And in her voice, somehow, there was a note as of intoxication, of abandonment. Meanwhile dull, reddish sunbeams were beginning to peer through the fence, and to warm the long, pointed staples with which it was fastened together. While in a stream of water that was dripping from the eaves, and trickling over the floor of the court, and around the woman's feet, a single beam was bathing and quivering as though it would fain effect an advance to the woman's lap and the hencoop, and, with the soft, downy chicks, enjoy the caresses of the woman's bare white arms.