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She had hardly left the cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck. "You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck. "Let us go and have tea on the island!"
"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence "is it true that you are to be tried for something?" "I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer." "But what for?" "For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics," yawned Pyotr Dmitritch "the antagonisms of Left and Right.
He stamped his foot irritably, but she only laughed, and answered: "Are you trying to frighten me? I am not Tania, you know, and I don't intend to run away. Look, you are waking Lubotchka, and she will have convulsions again. Why do you shout like that?" "Well, well! I won't again," said the master of the house his anxiety getting the better of his temper.
"You have only to know how to hold the scythe and not to get too hot over it that is, not to use more force than is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn't you like to try?" he said, offering the scythe to Lubotchka. "Come!" Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
"Don't be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!" cried Olga Mihalovna, loud enough for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. "Don't be afraid! You must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow." Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at being talked to as though grown up.
"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "What a coward you are!" "No, no, no," cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees, she walked rapidly back. Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a softened and melancholy face.
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches. She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl of seventeen who had not long left boarding-school.
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there was nothing out of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew that they found him attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which every one said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as with all women. But, all the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.
Pyotr Dmitritch, with his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of his big handsome person.
She wanted to cry. She was by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband was worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had nothing to fear from Lubotchka or from those women who were now drinking coffee indoors.
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