was easy to be benevolent
when one had six thousand acres.

Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in
complete idleness just as I did. When she got up in the morning she
immediately took up a book and sat down to read on the terrace in
a deep arm-chair, with her feet hardly touching the ground, or hid
herself with her book in the lime avenue, or walked out into the
fields. She spent the whole day reading, poring greedily over her
book, and only from the tired, dazed look in her eyes and the extreme
paleness of her face one could divine how this continual reading
exhausted her brain. When I arrived she would flush a little, leave
her book, and looking into my face with her big eyes, would tell
me eagerly of anything that had happened--for instance, that the
chimney had been on fire in the servants' hall, or that one of the
men had caught a huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually
went about in a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went for
walks together, picked cherries for making jam, went out in the
boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or sculled in the boat,
her thin, weak arms showed through her transparent sleeves. Or I
painted a sketch, and she stood beside me watching rapturously.

One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about
nine o clock in the morning. I walked about the park, keeping a
good distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which
there was a great number that summer, and noting their position so
as to come and pick them afterwards with Genya. There was a warm
breeze. I saw Genya and her mother both in light holiday dresses
coming home from church, Genya holding her hat in the wind. Afterwards
I heard them having tea on the terrace.

For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my
perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our country-houses
in the summer have always had a particular charm. When the green
garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks
radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and
oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back
from church and are having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly
dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, well-fed,
handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one
wishes that all life were like that. Now, too, I had the same
thought, and walked about the garden prepared to