e rooms, opening one cupboard after another,
and went upstairs. It was a long time before they could find her
and call her to dinner, and she came in when we had finished our
soup. All these tiny details I remember with tenderness, and that
whole day I remember vividly, though nothing special happened. After
dinner Genya lay in a long arm-chair reading, while I sat upon the
bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was
overcast with clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain. It was
hot; the wind had dropped, and it seemed as though the day would
never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace, looking
drowsy and carrying a fan.

"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for you
to sleep in the day."

They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other
would stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call
"Aa--oo, Genya!" or "Mother, where are you?" They always said their
prayers together, and had the same faith; and they understood each
other perfectly even when they did not speak. And their attitude
to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used
to me and fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days,
sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with
enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to chatter as
Misuce, she told me what had happened, and confided to me her
domestic secrets.

She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not
care for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived
her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and
enigmatic a person as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is
to the sailors.

"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say.
"Isn't she?"

Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.

"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an
undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You
wouldn't easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am
beginning to be a little uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books
--all that's very good, but why go to extremes? She is three-and-twenty,
you know; it's time for her to think seriously of herself. With her
books and her dispensary she will find life has slipped by without
having noticed it. . . . She must be married."

Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her
head and said as it were to