d that love only
you, Tanya, can give me. I am happy! I am happy!"

She was overwhelmed, and huddling and shrinking together, seemed
ten years older all at once, while he thought her beautiful and
expressed his rapture aloud:

"How lovely she is!"

VI

Learning from Kovrin that not only a romance had been got up, but
that there would even be a wedding, Yegor Semyonitch spent a long
time in pacing from one corner of the room to the other, trying to
conceal his agitation. His hands began trembling, his neck swelled
and turned purple, he ordered his racing droshky and drove off
somewhere. Tanya, seeing how he lashed the horse, and seeing how
he pulled his cap over his ears, understood what he was feeling,
shut herself up in her room, and cried the whole day.

In the hot-houses the peaches and plums were already ripe; the
packing and sending off of these tender and fragile goods to Moscow
took a great deal of care, work, and trouble. Owing to the fact
that the summer was very hot and dry, it was necessary to water
every tree, and a great deal of time and labour was spent on doing
it. Numbers of caterpillars made their appearance, which, to Kovrin's
disgust, the labourers and even Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya squashed
with their fingers. In spite of all that, they had already to book
autumn orders for fruit and trees, and to carry on a great deal of
correspondence. And at the very busiest time, when no one seemed
to have a free moment, the work of the fields carried off more than
half their labourers from the garden. Yegor Semyonitch, sunburnt,
exhausted, ill-humoured, galloped from the fields to the garden and
back again; cried that he was being torn to pieces, and that he
should put a bullet through his brains.

Then came the fuss and worry of the trousseau, to which the Pesotskys
attached a good deal of importance. Every one's head was in a whirl
from the snipping of the scissors, the rattle of the sewing-machine,
the smell of hot irons, and the caprices of the dressmaker, a huffy
and nervous lady. And, as ill-luck would have it, visitors came
every day, who had to be entertained, fed, and even put up for the
night. But all this hard labour passed unnoticed as though in a
fog. Tanya felt that love and happiness had taken her unawares,
though she had, since she was fourteen, for some reason been convinced
that Kovrin would marry her and no one else. She was bewildered,
could not grasp it, could not believe herself.