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Don't deny yourself anything. You ought to be as bold as your desires; don't fall short of them." "Can it be so hard to understand me?" Anna Akimovna asked with amazement, and her eyes were bright with tears. "Understand, I have an immense business on my hands two thousand workmen, for whom I must answer before God. The men who work for me grow blind and deaf.
It came from the bailiff at the forest villa; he wrote that he was sending fifteen hundred roubles, which he had been awarded as damages, having won an appeal. Anna Akimovna disliked and feared such words as "awarded damages" and "won the suit."
From the gates to the doors of the office there would stretch a long file of strange people with brutal faces, in rags, numb with cold, hungry and already drunk, in husky voices calling down blessings upon Anna Akimovna, their benefactress, and her parents: those at the back would press upon those in front, and those in front would abuse them with bad language.
A poor student! Who knows, if she had been embraced by a rich student or an officer the consequences might have been different. "Why don't you wish it?" Anna Akimovna asked. "What more do you want?" Mishenka was silent and looked at the arm-chair fixedly, and raised his eyebrows. "Do you love some one else?" Silence. The red-haired Masha came in with letters and visiting cards on a tray.
Some petty official called Tchalikov had long been out of a situation, was ill, and living in Gushtchin's Buildings; his wife was in consumption, and he had five little girls. Anna Akimovna knew well the four-storeyed house, Gushtchin's Buildings, in which Tchalikov lived. Oh, it was a horrid, foul, unhealthy house! "Well, I will give it to that Tchalikov," she decided.
Every one in the house knew that red-haired Masha was in love with Mishenka, the footman, and this genuine, passionate, hopeless love had already lasted three years. "Come, don't talk nonsense," Anna Akimovna consoled her. "I am going on for thirty, but I am still meaning to marry a young man."
Anna Akimovna walked through the rooms followed by her retinue the aunt, Varvarushka, Nikandrovna, the sewing-maid Marfa Petrovna, and the downstairs Masha. Varvarushka a tall, thin, slender woman, taller than any one in the house, dressed all in black, smelling of cypress and coffee crossed herself in each room before the ikon, bowing down from the waist.
"Tchalikov came again this evening," she said, yawning, "but I did not dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come again tomorrow." "What does he want with me?" said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb on the floor. "I won't see him, I won't."
Anna Akimovna met people on the stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her. She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than of her acquaintances of the educated class. There was no entry at No. 46; the door opened straight into the kitchen.
"You wrote that your wife was very ill," said Anna Akimovna, and she felt ashamed and annoyed. "I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred," she thought. "Here she is, my wife," said Tchalikov in a thin feminine voice, as though his tears had gone to his head. "Here she is, unhappy creature! With one foot in the grave! But we do not complain, madam. Better death than such a life.
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