"Well, how do you feel?"

"Oh, all right. . . ."

A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other
without words.

"It's dreadful having one's first baby," said Olga Mihalovna after
a moment's thought. "I keep feeling as though I shall not get through
it, as though I shall die."

"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of
fancies."

Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little
on her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a
rather didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her
authority; she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the
child, of her sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara
as naïve and trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say
something herself.

"Olya, we are going indoors," Pyotr Dmitritch called from the
raspberries.

Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara.
She would have been ready to stay like that till night without
speaking or having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had
hardly left the cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running
to meet her. The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards