a feeling of disgust for Masha. 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. Guessing that they were talking about her, she
blushed to tears.

"The postmen have come," she muttered. "And there is a clerk called
Tchalikov waiting below. He says you told him to come to-day for
something."

"What insolence!" said Anna Akimovna, moved to anger. "I gave him
no orders. Tell him to take himself off; say I am not at home!"

A ring was heard. It was the priests from her parish. They were
always shown into the aristocratic part of the house--that is,
upstairs. After the priests, Nazaritch, the manager of the factory,
came to pay his visit, and then the factory doctor; then Mishenka
announced the inspector of the elementary schools. Visitors kept
arriving.

When there was a moment free, Anna Akimovna sat down in a deep
arm-chair in the drawing-room, and shutting her eyes, thought that
her loneliness was quite natural because she had not married and
never would marry. . . . But that was not her fault. Fate itself
had flung her out of the simple working-class surroundings in which,
if she could trust her memory, she had felt so snug and at home,
into these immense rooms, where she could never think what to do
with herself, and could not understand why so many people kept
passing before her eyes. What was happening now seemed to her
trivial, useless, since it did not and could not give her happiness
for one minute.

"If I could fall in love," she thought, stretching; the very thought
of this sent a rush of warmth to her heart. "And if I could escape
from the factory . . ." she mused, imagining how the weight of those
factory buildings, barracks, and schools would roll off her conscience,
roll off her mind. . . . Then she remembered her father, and thought
if he had lived longer he would certainly have married her to a
working man--to Pimenov, for instance. He would have told her to
marry, and that would have been all about it. And it would have
been a good thing; then the factory would have passed into capable
hands.

She pictured his curly head, his bold profile, his delic