United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Appeal to Dashenka; she will go with you anywhere you like." "Can't you help thinking of her even now?" "Poor little spaniel! Give her my greetings. Does she know that even in Switzerland you had fixed on her for your old age? What prudence! What foresight! Aie, who's that?" At the farther end of the room a door opened a crack; a head was thrust in and vanished again hurriedly.

A woman's voice articulated rapidly. "Is that you, Pyotr Petrovitch? Are you back already? Well, what is it? What has the baby been christened? Who was godmother?" "The godmother was Natalya Andreyevna Velikosvyetsky, and the godfather Pavel Ivanitch Bezsonnitsin. . . . I . . . I believe, Dashenka, I am dying.

I am going to-morrow! I am a maiden lady and I won't allow you to stand before me in your underclothes! How dare you look at me when I am not dressed!" And she went on and on. . . . Knowing that when Dashenka was enraged there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even by firing a cannon, Strizhin waved his hand in despair, dressed, and made up his mind to go to the doctor.

I was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is only a burning in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over, thank God. . . . And why? It's because of my regular life." "No, it's because it's inferior paraffin!" sighed Dashenka, thinking of the household expenses and gazing into space.

Dashenka, hearing that the cupboard had been opened without her permission, grew more wide-awake. . . . She quickly lighted a candle, jumped out of bed, and in her nightgown, a freckled, bony figure in curl-papers, padded with bare feet to the cupboard. "Who told you you might?" she asked sternly, as she scrutinized the inside of the cupboard. "Was the vodka put there for you?"

I believe they'll come together again, if only Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch doesn't put off coming, as he promised." "I'll write to him at once. If that's how it was, there was nothing in the quarrel; all nonsense! And I know Darya too well. It's nonsense!" "I'm sorry for what I said about Dashenka, I did wrong. Their conversations were quite ordinary and they talked out loud, too.

He lay awake till morning expecting death, and all the time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered with fresh green grass and how the birds would twitter over it. . . . And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile to Dashenka: "One who leads a steady and regular life, dear sister, is unaffected by any poison. Take me, for example. I have been on the verge of death.

And the baby has been christened Olimpiada, in honour of their kind patroness. . . . I . . . I have just drunk paraffin, Dashenka!" "What next! You don't say they gave you paraffin there?" "I must own I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you, and . . . and the Lord chastised me: by accident in the dark I took paraffin. . . . What am I to do?"

That it was really poison that he had taken was proved not only by the smell in the room but also by the burning taste in his mouth, the flashes before his eyes, the ringing in his head, and the colicky pain in his stomach. "Dashenka," he said in a tearful voice as he went into the bedroom, "dear Dashenka!" Something grumbled in the darkness and uttered a deep sigh. "Dashenka." "Eh? What?"

"Dear Dashenka," moaned Strizhin, "it's a question of life and death, and you talk about money!" "He's drunk himself tipsy and now he pokes his nose into the cupboard!" cried Dashenka, angrily slamming the cupboard door. "Oh, the monsters, the tormentors! I'm a martyr, a miserable woman, no peace day or night! Vipers, basilisks, accursed Herods, may you suffer the same in the world to come!