woman. She had grown very fat, which is said to make a woman younger, but deep, soft wrinkles were apparent on her white plumpness. She never went to town now, it was even difficult for her to get into her carriage, but she was still as kindhearted and still just as silly as ever (now that her beauty no longer biases one, the truth may be told). With her lived her twenty-three-year-old daughter Lisa, a Russian country belle, and her brother, our acquaintance the cavalryman, who had good-naturedly squandered the whole of his little property, and had found a home for his old age with Anna Fyódorovna. The hair on his head was quite grey, his upper lip had fallen in, but the moustache above it was still carefully blackened. Not only his forehead and cheeks but even his nose and neck were wrinkled, and his back was bent, yet in the movements of his feeble, crooked legs, the manner of a cavalryman was still perceptible.
The family and those of the household sat in the little drawing-room of the old house, with an open door leading out on to the verandah and open windows overlooking the ancient star-shaped garden with its lime trees. Grey-haired Anna Fyódorovna sat in a lilac jacket on the sofa, before which stood a round mahogany table on which she was laying out cards. Her old brother, in his clean white trousers and blue coat, had settled himself by the window, and was plaiting a cord out of white cotton with the aid of a wooden fork—an occupation his niece had taught him, and which he liked very much, as he could no longer do anything, and his eyes were too weak for his favourite occupation, newspaper reading. Pímotchka, Anna Fyódorovna’s ward, sat by him learning a lesson—Lisa helping her and at the same time, with wooden knitting needles, making a goat’s-wool stocking for her uncle. The last rays of the setting sun shone, as usual at that hour, through the lime-tree avenue, and threw slanting gleams on to the farthest window and the whatnot standing near it. It was so quiet in the garden and the room, that one could hear the swift flutter of a swallow’s wings outside the window, and in the room Anna Fyódorovna’s soft sigh, or the slight groan of the old man as he crossed his legs.