Akoulína again rose, and got her husband’s boots—abominable soldier’s boots, with holes in them—and got down his coat and passed it to him without speaking.
“Won’t you change your shirt, Polikéy?”
“No,” he answered.
Akoulína never once looked at his face while he put on his boots and coat, and she did well not to look. Polikéy’s face was pale, his nether jaw trembled, and in his eyes there was that tearful, submissive and deeply mournful look one only sees in the eyes of kindly, weak, and guilty people.
He combed his hair, and was going out; but his wife stopped him, hid the string of his shirt that hung down from under his coat, and put his cap on for him.
“What’s that, Polikoúshka? Has the mistress sent for you?” came the voice of the carpenter’s wife from behind the partition.
Only that morning the carpenter’s wife had had high words with Akoulína about her pot of potash that Polikéy’s children had upset, and at first she was pleased to hear Polikéy being summoned to the mistress: most likely for no good. She was a cute, diplomatic lady, with a biting tongue. Nobody knew better than she how to pay anyone out with a word: so she imagined.
“I expect you’ll be sent to town to do the shopping,” she continued. “I suppose a safe person must be chosen to do that job, so you’ll be sent! Please buy a quarter of a pound of tea for me there, Polikéy.”
Akoulína forced back her tears, and an angry expression distorted her lips. She felt as if she could have clutched “that vixen the joiner’s wife, by her mangy hair.” But when she looked at her children, and thought that