about with anxious
faces, and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop
their terrible movement. They showed Anna Akimovna something and
respectfully explained it to her. She remembered how in the forge
a piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an
old man with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a
blue shirt with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably
one of the foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how
the golden sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a
little afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet-iron
with a clang. The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the
young man had wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something
to her. And she remembered, too, how in another department an old
man with one eye had been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron
filings were scattered about; and how a red-haired man in black
spectacles, with holes in his shirt, had been working at a lathe,
making something out of a piece of steel: the lathe roared and
hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt sick at the sound, and
it seemed as though they were boring into her ears. She looked,
listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and felt ashamed.
To get hundreds of thousands of roubles from a business which one
does not understand and cannot like--how strange it is!

And she had not once been in the workpeople's barracks. There, she
was told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy. It was
an astonishing thing: a thousand roubles were spent annually on
keeping the barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the
anonymous letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse
and worse every year.

"There was more order in my father's day," thought Anna Akimovna,
as she drove out of the yard, "because he had been a workman himself.
I know nothing about it and only do silly things."

She felt depressed again, and was no longer glad that she had come,
and the thought of the lucky man upon whom fifteen hundred roubles
would drop from heaven no longer struck her as original and amusing.
To go to some Tchalikov or other, when at home a business worth a
million was gradually going to pieces and being ruined, and the
workpeople in the barracks were living worse than convicts, meant
doing something silly and cheating her conscience. Along the highroad
and across the fields near it, workpeople from