d Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the
middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems
unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad. Yesterday here, as on every
evening, lights burned, the most rollicking of music rang out, blue
tobacco smoke swirled, men and women careered in couples, shaking their
hips and throwing their legs on high. And the entire street shone on
the outside with the red lanterns over the street doors and with the
light from the windows, and it seethed with people and carriages until
morning.

Now the street is empty. It is glowing triumphantly and joyously in the
glare of the summer sun. But in the parlor all the window curtains are
lowered, and for that reason it is dark within, cool, and as peculiarly
uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres, riding academies and
court buildings usually are in the middle of the day.

The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side; the
yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten faintly. The
stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday's odour; it smells of
perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a large uninhabited room, the
perspiration of unclean and unhealthy feminine flesh, face-powder,
boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of the yellow mastic with which the
parquet floor had been polished yesterday. And with a strange charm the
smell of withering swamp grass is blended with these smells. To-day is
Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the
establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a
whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick
blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about--in the corridors, in
the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They, also, had lit the
lamps before all the images. The girls, by tradition, dare not do this
with their hands, which have been denied during the night.

And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is carved in
the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees. And so with all
the houses--the thin white trunks with their scant dying verdure adorn
the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and doors.

The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. The chopping of cutlets
for dinner can be heard from the kitchen. Liubka, one of the girls,
barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-looking, freckled,
but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner court.
Yesterd