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In the cold, foul weather of autumn, on one of Tula’s highways, flooded by rains and indented with many black ruts, up to a long hut with a government posting station in one wing and private living quarters where one could rest or spend the night, have dinner or ask for the samovar in the other, there drove a tarantass[1], bespattered with mud and with its top half-raised, pulled by three quite ordinary horses with their tails tied up out of the slush. On the box of the tarantass sat a sturdy peasant in a tightly belted, heavy cloth coat, serious and dark-faced, with a sparse, jet-black beard, looking like a robber of old, and inside the tarantass sat a svelte old military man in a large peaked cap[2] and a grey greatcoat with an upright beaver collar of Nicholas I’s time, still black-browed, but with white whiskers which joined up with similar sideburns; his chin was shaved, and his appearance as a whole bore that resemblance[3] to Alexander II[4] which was so prevalent among military men at the time of his reign; his gaze was both enquiring, stern and at the same time weary.
When the horses came to a halt[5], he threw a leg in a level-topped military boot out of the tarantass and, holding back the skirts of the greatcoat with suede-gloved hands, ran up onto the porch of the hut.
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“How impermissibly beautiful you are!” he said, fixedly examining the variegated grey of her eyes, the matt whiteness of her face and the sheen of the dark hair beneath her white headscarf.
“Do you think so? And do you want not to permit me to be so?”
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