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Updated: June 24, 2025
"I have told you everything. How is it you have not understood? Drink up your tea." "Tell me again," he pleaded. "Take your tea first; pour out the rum. I repeat I have already told you all. You remember about the mice? Did you not understand that?" Kseniya Ippolytovna sat erect in her chair; she spoke coldly, in the same distant tone in which she had addressed the butler.
Kseniya Ippolytovna established herself in her mother's rooms. She told the one ancient retainer that the household should be conducted as in her parents' day, with all the old rules and regulations.
Kseniya Ippolytovna had been listening, alert and restless. "But all the same," she answered Vera Lvovna animatedly, "Isn't the absence of tragedy the true tragedy?" "Yes, that alone." "And love?" "No, not love." "But aren't you married?" "I want my baby." Kseniya Ippolytovna, who was lying on the sofa, rose up on her knees, and stretching out her arms cried: "Ah, a baby! Is that not instinct?"
At midnight, just as they were expecting the clock to chime, Kseniya Ippolytovna rose to propose a toast; in her right hand was a glass; her left was flung back behind her plaited hair; she held her head high. All the guests at once rose to their feet. "I am a woman," she cried aloud. "I drink to ourselves, to women, to the gentle, to the homely, to happiness and purity! To motherhood!
She became silent, folded her hands and laid them against her cheek; for a moment she had a sorrowful, forlorn expression. "Continue, Kseniya Ippolytovna", Polunin urged. "I was driving by our fields and thinking how life here is as simple and monotonous as the fields themselves, and that it is possible to live here a serious life without trivialities. You know what it is to live for trivialities.
She looked very beautiful and modest as she stood there, wiping the corner of her mouth with her handkerchief. Kseniya Ippolytovna arrived late when dusk was already falling and blue shadows crept over the snow. The sky had darkened, becoming shrouded in a murky blue; bullfinches chirruped in the snow under the windows.
"The last time, I sat down to play a game of chance amidst the fjords in a little valley hotel; a dreadful storm raged the whole while," Kseniya Ippolytovna remarked pensively. "Yes, there are big and little tragedies in life!" The wind shrieked mournfully; snow lashed at the windows. Kseniya stayed on until a late hour, and Alena invited her to remain overnight; but she refused and left.
"But I have not forgiven you that June!" she flashed at him; then she resumed: "The library, too, is the same as ever. Do you remember how we used to read Maupassant together in there?" Kseniya Ippolytovna approached the library-door, opened it, and went in.
Kseniya Ippolytovna awoke late on that day and did not get up, lying without stirring in bed until dinner time, her hands behind her head. It was a clear, bright day and the sun's golden rays streamed in through the windows, and were reflected on the polished floor, casting wavy shadows over the dark heavy tapestry on the walls.
Outside was the cold blue glare of the snow, which was marked with the imprints of birds' feet, and a vast stretch of clear turquoise sky. The bedroom was large and gloomy; the polished floor was covered with rugs; a canopied double bedstead stood against the further wall; a large wardrobe was placed in a corner. Kseniya Ippolytovna looked haggard and unhappy.
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