and said that it wouldn't be amiss to sell their old coach before
the spring and to buy something rather newer and lighter instead,
and that it might be as well to change the left trace horse and to
put Bobtchinsky (that was the name of one of her husband's horses)
in the shafts.

"His wife listened to him and said:

"'Do as you think best, but it makes no difference to me now.
Before the summer I shall be in the cemetery.'

"Her husband, of course, shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"'I am not joking,' she said. 'I tell you in earnest that I shall
soon be dead.'

"'What do you mean by soon?'

"'Directly after my confinement. I shall bear my child and die.'

"The husband attached no significance to these words. He did not
believe in presentiments of any sort, and he knew that ladies in
an interesting condition are apt to be fanciful and to give way to
gloomy ideas generally. A day later his wife spoke to him again of
dying immediately after her confinement, and then every day she
spoke of it and he laughed and called her a silly woman, a
fortune-teller, a crazy creature. Her approaching death became an
_idée fixé_ with his wife. When her husband would not listen to her
she would go into the kitchen and talk of her death to the nurse
and the cook.