he were trying to
catch something and he was in a constant fidget.

"You wait," he said, bustling about. "Look here!... What was I saying
just now?"

We began to talk. I discovered that the estate had till recently
belonged to the Cheprakovs and only the previous autumn had passed to
Dolyhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than
in shares, and had already bought three big estates in our district with
the transfer of all mortgages. When Cheprakov's mother sold, she
stipulated for the right to live in one of the wings for another two
years and got her son a job in the office.

"Why shouldn't he buy?" said Cheprakov of the engineer. "He gets a lot
from the contractors. He bribes them all."

Then he took me to dinner, deciding in his emphatic way that I was to
live with him in the wing and board with his mother.

"She is a screw," he said, "but she will not take much from you."

In the small rooms where his mother lived there was a queer jumble; even
the hall and the passage were stacked with furniture, which had been
taken from the house after the sale of the estate; and the furniture was
old, and of redwood. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout elderly lady, with
slanting, Chinese eyes, sat by the window, in a big chair, knitting a
stocking. She received me ceremoniously.

"It is Pologniev, mother," said Cheprakov, introducing me. "He is going
to work here."

"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice as though
she had boiling fat in her throat.

"Yes," I answered.

"Sit down."

The dinner was bad. It consisted only of a pie with unsweetened curds
and some milk soup. Elena Nikifirovna, my hostess, was perpetually
winking, first with one eye, then with the other. She talked and ate,
but in her whole aspect there was a deathlike quality, and one could
almost detect the smell of a corpse. Life hardly stirred in her, yet she
had the air of being the lady of the manor, who had once had her serfs,
and was the wife of a general, whose servants had to call him "Your
Excellency," and when these miserable embers of life flared up in her
for a moment, she would say to her son:

"Ivan, that is not the way to hold your knife!"

Or she would say, gasping for breath, with the preciseness of a hostess
labouring to entertain her guest:

"We have just sold our estate, you know. It is a pity, of course, we
have got so used to being here, but Dolyhikov promised to make Ivan
station-ma