of disturbing the peaceful and comfortable attitude she had found
at last for her exhausted body. The bedclothes, the rags and bowls,
the splashes of water on the floor, the little paint-brushes and
spoons thrown down here and there, the white bottle of lime water,
the very air, heavy and stifling--were all hushed and seemed
plunged in repose.

The doctor stopped close to his wife, thrust his hands in his trouser
pockets, and slanting his head on one side fixed his eyes on his
son. His face bore an expression of indifference, and only from the
drops that glittered on his beard it could be seen that he had just
been crying.

That repellent horror which is thought of when we speak of death
was absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the
mother's attitude, in the indifference on the doctor's face there
was something that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle,
almost elusive beauty of human sorrow which men will not for a long
time learn to understand and describe, and which it seems only music
can convey. There was a feeling of beauty, too, in the austere
stillness. Kirilov and his wife were silent and not weeping, as
though besides the bitterness of their loss they were conscious,
too, of all the tragedy of their position; just as once their youth
had passed away, so now together with this boy their right to have
children had gone for ever to all eternity! The doctor was forty-four,
his hair was grey and he looked like an old man; his faded and
invalid wife was thirty-five. Andrey was not merely the only child,
but also the last child.

In contrast to his wife the doctor belonged to the class of people