isitors would arrive. Her aunt
would come to Vera and say:

"You should sit a little with the visitors, or else they'll think
that you are stuck up."

Vera would go in to the visitors and play _vint_ with them for hours
together, or play the piano for the visitors to dance; her aunt,
in high spirits and breathless from dancing, would come up and
whisper to her:

"Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna."

On the sixth of December, St. Nikolay's Day, a large party of about
thirty arrived all at once; they played _vint_ until late at night,
and many of them stayed the night. In the morning they sat down to
cards again, then they had dinner, and when Vera went to her room
after dinner to rest from conversation and tobacco smoke, there
were visitors there too, and she almost wept in despair. And when
they began to get ready to go in the evening, she was so pleased
they were going at last, that she said:

"Do stay a little longer."

She felt exhausted by the visitors and constrained by their presence;
yet every day, as soon as it began to grow dark, something drew her
out of the house, and she went out to pay visits either at the works
or at some neighbours', and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits,
suppers. . . .The young people in the works or in the mines sometimes
sang Little Russian songs, and sang them very well. It made one sad
to hear them sing. Or they all gathered together in one room and
talked in the dusk of the mines, of the treasures that had once
been buried in the steppes, of Saur's Grave. . . . Later on, as
they talked, a shout of "Help!" sometimes reached them. It was a
drunken man going home, or some one was being robbed by the pit
near by. Or the wind howled in the chimneys, the shutters banged;
then, soon afterwards, they would hear the uneasy church bell, as
the snow-storm began.

At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was
invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most
interesting man. There was very little reading either at the works
or at the country-houses; they played only marches and polkas; and
the young people always argued hotly about things they did not
understand, and the effect was crude. The discussions were loud and
heated, but, strange to say, Vera had nowhere else met people so
indifferent and careless as these. They seemed to have no fatherland,
no religion, no public interests. When they talked of literature
or debated some abstract question,