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'I used to write her composition for her, when we were at school together, says she; 'and now she is quite the idol of the literary world; while I am never heard of beyond my own family, unless some one happens to introduce me as the friend of Clio. 'Why not write, then; and see if the world will not learn to introduce Clio as the friend of Matrona? 'I write! not for the world!
He went about as if demented all the evening, now into his aunts', then back into his own room, then out into the porch, thinking all the time how he could meet her alone; but she avoided him, and Matrona Pavlovna watched her closely. And so the evening passed and night came. The doctor went to bed.
She liked Tourgeneff's Lull best. They had talks at moments snatched when meeting in the passage, on the veranda, or the yard, and sometimes in the room of his aunts' old servant, Matrona Pavlovna, with whom he sometimes used to drink tea, and where Katusha used to work. These talks in Matrona Pavlovna's presence were the pleasantest. When they were alone it was worse.
"Why is it all being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here, making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for?
But in a few minutes Kolosov, as usual, had got everything and everyone into full swing; he sat Varia down to the piano, begged her to play a dance tune, and proceeded to dance a Cossack dance in competition with Ivan Semyonitch. The lieutenant uttered little shrieks, stamped and cut such incredible capers that even Matrona Semyonovna burst out laughing and retreated to her own room upstairs.
"Yes, sir." "Do you think so? Who's there?" asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman's dress at the door. "It's I," said a firm, pleasant, woman's voice, and the stern, pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at the doorway. "Well, what is it, Matrona?" queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to her at the door. "Well, what now?" he asked disconsolately.
Varia hurriedly got up and went off to her own room without, however, pressing my hand or glancing at me. Mr. Sidorenko was even more amiable than on the previous day: he laughed, rubbed his stomach, made jokes about Matrona Semyonovna, and so on. I was on the point of asking for his blessing there and then, but I thought better of it and deferred doing so till the next day.
At home, she did the sewing and the mending, and generally dressed her mistress and combed her hair. For this work the matrona received a salary of six or seven dollars a month, and it seems to have been usual for her employers to arrange a good marriage for her after several years of service, giving her at that time from one hundred to one hundred and fifty crowns as a dowry.
But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household.
Evidently they hadn't expected such a proceeding on my part, and had given no order in regard to me. I went straight to the bailiff as though I were a neighbour; I go into the yard and look around; there was Matrona sitting on the steps leaning on her elbow. She was on the point of crying out, but I held up my finger and pointed outside, towards the open country.
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