shame at her own thoughts and actions, and the fear that she had said something improper during the day, and disgust at her own lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely. She took up a candle and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been joking. Then she went to her bedroom. Red-haired Masha, who was dozing in an arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the pillows. Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had fallen on one side.
'Tchalikov came again this evening,' she said, yawning, 'but I did not dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come again tomorrow.'
'What does he want with me?' said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb on the floor. 'I won't see him, I won't.'
She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov, that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. So all she was fit for was to help the poor. Oh, how stupid it was!
She lay down without undressing, and sobbed with shame and depression: what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her dreams that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honourable, but at the same time she felt that Lysevitch and even Krylin were nearer to her than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together. She thought that if the long day she had just spent could have been represented in a picture, all that had been bad and vulgar -- as, for instance, the dinner, the lawyer's talk, the game of 'kings' -- would have been true, while her dreams and talk about Pimenov would have stood out from the whole as something false, as out of drawing; and she thought, too, that it was too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.
Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in mournful perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face against her mistress's arm, and without words it was clear why she was so wretched.
'We are fools!' said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. 'We are fools! Oh, what fools we are!'
NOTES
title: a more accurate translation would be 'A Kingdom of Women'
situation: job
Old Believers: those who belonged to the schismatic branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who did not accept the mid-17th century reforms; Old Believers were particularly common among the merchant class
asking forgiveness: it was the custom to ask forgiveness of everyone, particularly on the way to confession
red notes: 10-ruble notes were red
twenty degrees of frost: 13 degrees below zero F.
uniform: all students and teachers wore uniforms
actual civil councillor: 4th in rank on the Russian Civil Service Table of Ranks
barrister: lawyer
Anna ribbon: the Order of St. Anne, second class, was worn on a ribbon around the neck; it was greatly prized in Russia
Leconte de Lisle: French poet who lived 1818-1894
Duse: Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) was an Italian actress
third course: dessert
Duchess Josiana loved Gwinplin: in Victor Hugo's novel
Jules Verne: French writer of science fantasy who lived 1828-1905
Maupassant: the French short story writer and novelist Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
Turgenev: Ivan S. Turgenev, the Russian novelist (1818-1883)
toilet drawer: a drawer in her dressing table
kings: a card game for 4 players in which the player to take 9 tricks becomes 'king'
* * *
Rothschild's Fiddle
by Anton Chekhov
THE town was a little one, worse than a village, and it was inhabited by scarcely any but old people who died with an infrequency that was really annoying. In the hospital and in the prison fortress very few coffins were needed. In fact business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been an undertaker in the chief town of the province he would certainly have had a house of his own, and people would have addressed him as Yakov Matveyitch; here in this wretched little town people called him simply Yakov; his nickname in the street was for some reason Bronze, and he lived in a poor way like a humble peasant, in a little old hut in which there was only one room, and in this room he and Marfa, the stove, a double bed, the coffins, his bench, and all their belongings were crowded together.
Yakov made good, solid coffins. For peasants and working people he made them to fit himself, and this was never unsuccessful, for there were none taller and stronger than he, even in the prison, though he was seventy. For gentry and for women he made them to measure, and used an iron foot-rule for the purpose. He was very unwilling to take orders for children's coffins, and made them straight off without measurements, contemptuously, and when he was paid for the work he always said:
'I must confess I don't like trumpery jobs.'
Apart from his trade, playing the fiddle brought him in a small income.
