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Updated: June 7, 2025
Serafima Aleksandrovna stood up erect, sighed in a lost way, smiled, and called loudly: "Lelechka!" Lelechka was being carried out. The mother threw herself after the coffin with despairing sobs, but she was held back. She sprang behind the door, through which Lelechka had passed, sat down there on the floor, and as she looked through the crevice, she cried out: "Lelechka, tiu-tiu!"
This charming inability to speak always made, Serafima Aleksandrovna smile with tender rapture. Lelechka then ran away, stamping with her plump little legs over the carpets, and hid herself behind the curtains near her bed. "Tiu-tiu, mamochka!" she cried out in her sweet, laughing voice, as she looked out with a single roguish eye.
Fedosya, motionless, with dejected face, sat in a corner, and looked frightened at her mistress; then she suddenly burst out sobbing, and she wailed loudly: "She hid herself, and hid herself, our Lelechka, our angelic little soul!" Serafima Aleksandrovna trembled, paused, cast a perplexed look at Fedosya, began to weep, and left the nursery quietly. Sergey Modestovich hurried the funeral.
There was no other such child, there never had been, and there never would be. Lelechka's mother, Serafima Aleksandrovna, was sure of that. Lelechka's eyes were dark and large, her cheeks were rosy, her lips were made for kisses and for laughter. But it was not these charms in Lelechka that gave her mother the keenest joy. Lelechka was her mother's only child.
She glanced at her mother with her dimmed eyes, and lisped in a scarcely audible, hoarse voice: "Tiu-tiu, mamochka! Make tiu-tiu, mamochka!" Serafima Aleksandrovna hid her face behind the curtains near Lelechka's bed. How tragic! "Mamochka!" called Lelechka in an almost inaudible voice.
Serafima Aleksandrovna found this out, and, to her own astonishment, was not particularly hurt; she awaited her infant with a restless anticipation that swallowed every other feeling. A little girl was born; Serafima Aleksandrovna gave herself up to her. At the beginning she used to tell her husband, with rapture, of all the joyous details of Lekchka's existence.
Perhaps it was because he himself loved the cold he loved to drink cold water, and to breathe cold air. He was always fresh and cool, with a frigid smile, and wherever he passed cold currents seemed to move in the air. The Nesletyevs, Sergey Modestovich and Serafima Aleksandrovna, had married without love or calculation, because it was the accepted thing.
The old woman had invented this sign, quite suddenly, herself; and she was evidently very proud of it. Lelechka was asleep, and Serafima Aleksandrovna was sitting in her own room, thinking with joy and tenderness of Lelechka.
Nothing made her so unhappy as the reiterations of Fedosya, uttered between sobs: "She hid herself and hid herself, our Lelechka!" But the thoughts of Serafima Aleksandrovna were confused, and she could not quite grasp what was happening. Fever was consuming Lelechka, and there were times when she lost consciousness and spoke in delirium.
That was why every movement of Lelechka's bewitched her mother. It was great bliss to hold Lelechka on her knees and to fondle her; to feel the little girl in her arms a thing as lively and as bright as a little bird. To tell the truth, Serafima Aleksandrovna felt happy only in the nursery. She felt cold with her husband.
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