silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs;
and Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking about the
drawing-room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly
on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray--only
then Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not
only Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and
old, and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from
their gold frames.

"There are two of us brothers," he began--"I, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my
brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in for a learned
profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay sat in
a government office from the time he was nineteen. Our father,
Tchimsha-Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and
left us a little estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the
little estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had
spent our childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children,
we passed our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after
horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And,
you know, whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the
migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks
over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman,
and will have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother
was miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this
yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of
buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a
lake.