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Updated: June 26, 2025
Zhmuhin got up, stretching and groaning with old age, and looked into the parlour. Noticing that his visitor was not asleep, he said: "When we were in the Caucasus, you know, there was a colonel there who was a vegetarian, too; he didn't eat meat, never went shooting, and would not let his servants catch fish.
"Excuse me, I feel stifled," he said; "I will go outside." Zhmuhin, still talking about women, drew the bolt in the entry and they both went out. A full moon was floating in the sky just over the yard, and in the moonlight the house and barn looked whiter than by day; and on the grass brilliant streaks of moonlight, white too, stretched between the black shadows.
The visitor turned over on the other side with his face to the back of the sofa and muttered something. "And here's another instance," Zhmuhin went on.
How do you look at it?" On one side a flash of lightning gleamed through a chink in the window-blinds. There was the stifling feeling of a storm coming, the gnats were biting, and Zhmuhin, as he lay in his bedroom meditating, sighed and groaned and said to himself: "Yes, to be sure " and there was no possibility of getting to sleep. Somewhere far, far away there was a growl of thunder.
IVAN ABRAMITCH ZHMUHIN, a retired Cossack officer, who had once served in the Caucasus, but now lived on his own farm, and who had once been young, strong, and vigorous, but now was old, dried up, and bent, with shaggy eyebrows and a greenish-grey moustache, was returning from the town to his farm one hot summer's day.
"Are you asleep?" "No," answered the visitor. Zhmuhin got up, and thudding with his heels walked through the parlour and the entry to the kitchen to get a drink of water. "The worst thing in the world, you know, is stupidity," he said a little later, coming back with a dipper. "My Lyubov Osipovna is on her knees saying her prayers.
"Don't pester our guest with your wild talk. Go away, mother!" Lyubov Osipovna went out, and in the entry repeated once more in a thin little voice: "Oh, it's such a pity!" A bed was made up for the visitor on the sofa in the parlour, and that it might not be dark for him they lighted the lamp before the ikon. Zhmuhin went to bed in his own room.
But they are not to blame. The younger one, at any rate, ought to be sent to school, it is such a pity!" she said slowly, and there was a quiver in her voice; and it seemed incredible that a woman so small and so youthful could have grown-up children. "Oh, it's such a pity!" "You don't know anything about it, mother, and it is not your affair," said Zhmuhin, appearing in the doorway.
He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and that he was going to the village Dyuevka on business. "Why, merciful heavens, that is six miles from me!" said Zhmuhin in a tone of voice as though someone were disputing with him. "But excuse me, you won't find horses at the station now.
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