n would not have even the beautiful and wealthy.
Auntie began to set this down to immorality, and said that people
had no fear of God, but she suddenly remembered that Ivan Ivanitch,
her brother, and Varvarushka--both people of holy life--had
feared God, but all the same had had children on the sly, and had
sent them to the Foundling Asylum. She pulled herself up and changed
the conversation, telling them about a suitor she had once had, a
factory hand, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had forced
her to marry a widower, an ikon-painter, who, thank God, had died
two years after. The downstairs Masha sat down to the table, too,
and told them with a mysterious air that for the last week some
unknown man with a black moustache, in a great-coat with an astrachan
collar, had made his appearance every morning in the yard, had
stared at the windows of the big house, and had gone on further--
to the buildings; the man was all right, nice-looking.

All this conversation made Anna Akimovna suddenly long to be married
--long intensely, painfully; she felt as though she would give
half her life and all her fortune only to know that upstairs there
was a man who was closer to her than any one in the world, that he
loved her warmly and was missing her; and the thought of such
closeness, ecstatic and inexpressible in words, troubled her soul.
And the instinct of youth and health flattered her with lying
assurances that the real poetry of life was not over but still to
come, and she believed it, and leaning back in her chair (her hair
fell down as she did so), she began laughing, and, looking at her,
the others laughed, too. And it was a long time before this causeless
laughter died down in the dining-room.

She was informed that the Stinging Beetle had come. This was a
pilgrim woman called Pasha or Spiridonovna--a thin little woman
of fifty, in a black dress with a white kerchief, with keen eyes,
sharp nose, and a sharp chin; she had sly, viperish eyes and she
looked as though she could see right through every one. Her lips
were shaped like a heart. Her viperishness and hostility to every
one had earned her the nickname of the Stinging Beetle.

Going into the dining-room without looking at any one, she made for
the ikons and chanted in a high voice "Thy Holy Birth," then she
sang "The Virgin today gives birth to the Son," then "Christ is
born," then she turned round and bent a piercing gaze upon all of
them.

"A happy C