“You are joking!”

“Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new teacher of history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko, a Little Russian, was appointed. He came, not alone, but with his sister Varinka. He was a tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one could see from his face that he had a bass voice, and, in fact, he had a voice that seemed to come out of a barrel⁠—‘boom, boom, boom!’ And she was not so young, about thirty, but she, too, was tall, well-made, with black eyebrows and red cheeks⁠—in fact, she was a regular sugarplum, and so sprightly, so noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing. For the least thing she would go off into a ringing laugh⁠—‘Ha-ha-ha!’ We made our first thorough acquaintance with the Kovalenkos at the headmaster’s name-day party. Among the glum and intensely bored teachers who came even to the name-day party as a duty we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite risen from the waves; she walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang, danced.⁠ ⁠… She sang with feeling ‘The Winds do Blow,’ then another song, and another, and she fascinated us all⁠—all, even Byelikov. He sat down by her and said with a honeyed smile:

“ ‘The Little Russian reminds one of the ancient Greek in its softness and agreeable resonance.’

“That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district, and that her mamma lived at the farm, and that they had such pears, such melons, such kabaks ! The Little Russians call pumpkins kabaks ( i.e. , pothouses), while their pothouses they call shinki , and they make a beetroot soup with tomatoes and aubergines in it, ‘which was so nice⁠—awfully nice!’

“We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us all:

“ ‘It would be a good thing to make a match of it,’ the headmaster’s wife said to me softly.