looking askance at the horse that was coming up, began to tuck in his sheepskin collar on both sides of his ruddy face, clean-shaven except for the moustache, so that his breath should not moisten the collar.
“See now! The young scamp is there already!” he exclaimed when he saw his little son in the sledge. Vasíli Andréevich was excited by the vodka he had drunk with his visitors, and so he was even more pleased than usual with everything that was his and all that he did. The sight of his son, whom he always thought of as his heir, now gave him great satisfaction. He looked at him, screwing up his eyes and showing his long teeth.
His wife—pregnant, thin and pale, with her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl so that nothing of her face could be seen but her eyes—stood behind him in the vestibule to see him off.
“Now really, you ought to take Nikíta with you,” she said timidly, stepping out from the doorway.
Vasíli Andréevich did not answer. Her words evidently annoyed him and he frowned angrily and spat.
“You have money on you,” she continued in the same plaintive voice. “What if the weather gets worse! Do take him, for goodness’ sake!”
“Why? Don’t I know the road that I must needs take a guide?” exclaimed Vasíli Andréevich, uttering every word very distinctly and compressing his lips unnaturally, as he usually did when speaking to buyers and sellers.
“Really you ought to take him. I beg you in God’s name!” his wife repeated, wrapping her shawl more closely round her head.
“There, she sticks to it like a leech! … Where am I to take him?”
“I’m quite ready to go with you, Vasíli Andréevich,” said Nikíta cheerfully. “But they must feed the horses while I am away,” he added, turning to his master’s wife.