IX

For on the topmost tier of the hotel verandah, after being carried up the steps in an armchair amid a bevy of footmen, maidservants, and other menials of the hotel, headed by the landlord (that functionary had actually run out to meet a visitor who arrived with so much stir and din, attended by her own retinue, and accompanied by so great a pile of trunks and portmanteaux)⁠—on the topmost tier of the verandah, I say, there was sitting⁠— the Grandmother ! Yes, it was she⁠—rich, and imposing, and seventy-five years of age⁠—Antonida Vassilievna Tarassevitcha, landowner and grande dame of Moscow⁠—the “ La Baboulenka