shut herself up in her room, and cried the whole day.

In the hot-houses the peaches and plums were already ripe; the
packing and sending off of these tender and fragile goods to Moscow
took a great deal of care, work, and trouble. Owing to the fact
that the summer was very hot and dry, it was necessary to water
every tree, and a great deal of time and labour was spent on doing
it. Numbers of caterpillars made their appearance, which, to Kovrin's
disgust, the labourers and even Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya squashed
with their fingers. In spite of all that, they had already to book
autumn orders for fruit and trees, and to carry on a great deal of
correspondence. And at the very busiest time, when no one seemed
to have a free moment, the work of the fields carried off more than
half their labourers from the garden. Yegor Semyonitch, sunburnt,
exhausted, ill-humoured, galloped from the fields to the garden and
back again; cried that he was being torn to pieces, and that he
should put a bullet through his brains.

Then came the fuss and worry of the trousseau, to which the Pesotskys
attached a good deal of importance. Every one's head was in a whirl
from the snipping of the scissors, the rattle of the sewing-machine,
the smell of hot irons, and the caprices of the dressmaker, a huffy
and nervous lady. And, as ill-luck would have it, visitors came
every day, who had to be entertained, fed, and even put up for the
night. But all this hard labour passed unnoticed as though in a
fog. Tanya felt that love and happiness had taken her unawares,
though she had, since she was fourteen, for some reason been convinced
that Kovrin would marry her and no one else. She was bewildered,
could not grasp it, could not believe herself. . . . At one minute
such joy would swoop down upon her that she longed to fly away to