The most
business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.
They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. The
company consists of five people. The proprietress herself, in
whose name the house is registered, is Anna Markovna. She is about
sixty. She is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be
visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft,
gelatinous globes--large, medium and small, pressed into each
other without any interstices; this--her skirt, torso and head.
Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but
the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a
raspberry colour, impotently hanging down. Her husband--Isaiah
Savvich--is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man.
He is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house
even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In
order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-
instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance
tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree
and craving some maudlin tears.
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