United States or Georgia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Ulyana Fyodorovna, you at least might show me consideration and give me a glass!" But Ulyana Fyodorovna did not show him consideration and drove him out of her sight. Meanwhile, Akim was walking with slow steps along the road to Lizaveta Prohorovna's house. He could not yet fully grasp his position; he was trembling all over like a man who had just escaped from a certain death.
The tea was poured out by a maiden lady of thirty, Arina Prohorovna's sister, a silent and malevolent creature, with flaxen hair and no eyebrows, who shared her sister's progressive ideas and was an object of terror to Virginsky himself in domestic life.
Lizaveta Prohorovna's house stood about a mile from her village to the left of the cross road along which Akim was walking. He was about to stop at the turning that led to his mistress's house ... but he walked on instead. He decided first to go to what had been his hut, where his uncle lived.
Akim was in her good graces; he paid her punctually every year a very considerable sum in lieu of service; she talked graciously to him and even, in jest, invited him as a guest ... but it was precisely in his mistress's house that trouble was in store for Akim. Among Lizaveta Prohorovna's maidservants was an orphan girl of twenty called Dunyasha.
And meantime he kept lashing and lashing the horse. Those who met him moved out of his way and gazed after him. In a quarter of an hour Akim had reached Lizaveta Prohorovna's house, had galloped up to the front door, jumped out of the cart and dashed straight into the entry. "What do you want?" muttered the frightened footman who was sleeping sweetly on the hall bench.
Kirillovna bought her freedom for a considerable sum and married for love a fair-haired young waiter who leads her a dreadful life; Avdotya lives as before among the maids in Lizaveta Prohorovna's house, but has sunk to a rather lower position; she is very poorly, almost dirtily dressed, and there is no trace left in her of the townbred airs and graces of a fashionable maid or of the habits of a prosperous innkeeper's wife.... No one takes any notice of her and she herself is glad to be unnoticed; old Petrovitch is dead and Akim is still wandering, a pilgrim, and God only knows how much longer his pilgrimage will last!