she
was the widow of a general whom the servants had to address as "your
Excellency"; and when these feeble relics of life flickered up in
her for an instant she would say to her son:

"Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!"

Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air
of a hostess trying to entertain a visitor:

"You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are
used to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster
of Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here
at the station, and that is just the same as being on our own
property! The engineer is so nice! Don't you think he is very
handsome?"

Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but
since the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena
Nikiforovna had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going
to law, and to not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was
in constant terror of being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya
had become unrecognizable.

Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild,
and was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down
the verandah, which was still solid and beautiful; through the glass
doors one could see a room with parquetted floor, probably the
drawing-room; an old-fashioned piano and pictures in deep mahogany
frames--there was nothing else. In the old flower-beds all that
remained were peonies and poppies, which lifted their white and
bright red heads above the grass. Young maples and elms, already
nibbled by the cows, grew beside the paths, drawn up and hindering
each other's growth. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed
impassable, but this was only near the house where there stood
poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of the same age, relics
of the former avenues. Further on, beyond them the garden had been
cleared for the sake of hay, and here it was not moist and stuffy,
and there were no spiders' webs in one's mouth and eyes. A light
breeze was blowing. The further one went the more open it was, and
here in the open space were cherries, plums, and spreading apple-trees,
disfigured by props and by canker; and pear-trees so tall that one
could not believe they were pear-trees. This part of the garden was
let to some shopkeepers of the town, and it was protected from
thieves and starlings by a feeble-minded peasant who lived in a
shanty in it.