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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Well, my children," he said firmly, with a lift of his head and in the peculiarly hurried manner of one who wishes to announce something obviously unwelcome, but no longer admitting of reconsideration, "you know, I suppose, that I am going to marry Avdotia Epifanov." He paused a moment.
MY father was forty-eight when he took as his second wife Avdotia Vassilievna Epifanov. I suspect that when, that spring, he had departed for the country with the girls, he had been in that communicatively happy, sociable mood in which gamblers usually find themselves who have retired from play after winning large stakes.
Yet Papa never noticed her nonsense, for he was too much taken up with coughing and with gazing at her with his look of happy, triumphant devotion. I noticed, too, that, although these fits of shyness attacked Avdotia, without any visible cause, they not infrequently ensued upon Papa's mention of one or another young and beautiful woman.
"Yes," said Woloda. "Still, I am surprised at you, Lubotshka. You are no longer a baby in long clothes. Why should you be so pleased because Papa is going to marry a piece of trash?" At this Lubotshka's face fell, and she became serious. "Oh, Woloda!" she exclaimed. "Why 'a piece of trash' indeed? How can you dare to speak of Avdotia like that? If Papa is going to marry her she cannot be 'trash."
He was sergeant in my company. Knight of the Orders of Russia! Was it so long ago that we " At last my father threw the Almanack away from him on the sofa, and remained deep in a brown study, which never betokened anything good. "Avdotia Vassiliéva," said he, sharply addressing my mother, "how old is Petróusha?" "His seventeenth year has just begun," replied my mother.
One evening, as I was sitting deep in thought and listening to Avdotia playing her waltz, I suddenly leapt to my feet, ran upstairs, got out the copy-book whereon I had once inscribed "Rules of My Life," opened it, and experienced my first moment of repentance and moral resolution. True, I burst into tears once more, but they were no longer tears of despair.
As a rule, Avdotia herself seemed to catch the infection of the happiness which sparkled at this period in Papa's large blue eyes; yet there were moments also when she would be seized with such a fit of shyness that I, who knew the feeling well, was full of sympathy and compassion as I regarded her embarrassment.
I did not write to you about Petr' Andréjïtch's wound in order not to frighten you without cause, and now we hear that our mistress, our mother, Avdotia Vassiliéva is ill of fright, and I shall go and pray heaven for her health.
At the same time, for all the mother's liveliness of disposition and the daughter's air of indifference and abstraction, something told one that the former was incapable of feeling affection for anything that was not pretty and gay, but that Avdotia, on the contrary, was one of those natures which, once they love, are willing to sacrifice their whole life for the man they adore.
He alleged as his reason for changing his mind that his suit was shortly to come on before the Senate, but Mimi averred that Avdotia had found herself so ennuyee in the country, and had so often talked about Moscow and pretended to be unwell, that Papa had decided to accede to her wishes.
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