'Weren't you his wife's lady's maid?'

'How did you know? Yes.'

I looked at Arina with redoubled curiosity and sympathy.

'I know your master,' I continued.

'Do you?' she replied in a low voice, and her head drooped.

I must tell the reader why I looked with such sympathy at Arina. During
my stay at Petersburg I had become by chance acquainted with Mr.
Zvyerkoff. He had a rather influential position, and was reputed a man
of sense and education. He had a wife, fat, sentimental, lachrymose and
spiteful--a vulgar and disagreeable creature; he had too a son, the
very type of the young swell of to-day, pampered and stupid. The
exterior of Mr. Zvyerkoff himself did not prepossess one in his favour;
his little mouse-like eyes peeped slyly out of a broad, almost square,
face; he had a large, prominent nose, with distended nostrils; his
close-cropped grey hair stood up like a brush above his scowling brow;
his thin lips were for ever twitching and smiling mawkishly. Mr.
Zvyerkoff's favourite position was standing with his legs wide apart
and his fat hands in his trouser pockets. Once I happened somehow to be
driving alone with Mr. Zvyerkoff in a coach out of town. We fell into
conversation. As a man of experience and of judgment, Mr. Zvyerkoff
began to try to set me in 'the path of truth.'

'Allow me to observe to you,' he drawled at last; 'all you young people
criticise and form judgments on everything at random; you have little
knowledge of your own country; Russia, young gentlemen, is an unknown