cult to turn round and oppressive to breathe in it. Platonida Ivanovna was sitting at the window, her knitting in her hands (she was knitting her darling Yasha a comforter, the thirty-eighth she had made him in the course of his life!), and was much astonished to see him. Aratov rarely went up to her, and if he wanted anything, used always to call, in his delicate voice, from his study : 'Aunt Platosha!' However, she made him sit down, and sat all alert, in expectation of his first words, watching him through her spectacles with one eye, over them with the other. She did not inquire after his health nor offer him tea, as she saw he had not come for that. Aratov was a little disconcerted . . . then he began to talk . . . talked of his mother, of how she had lived with his father and how his father had got to know her. All this he knew very well . . . but it was just what he wanted to talk about. Unluckily for him, Platosha did not know how to keep up a conversation at all; she gave him very brief replies, as though she suspected that was not what Yasha had come for.
'Eh!' she repeated, hurriedly, almost irritably plying her knitting-needles. 'We all know : your mother was a darling ... a darling that she was. . . . And your father loved her as a husband should, truly and faithfully even in her
