V
Volodya and his mother lived in their own house on the outskirts of the district town. Eugenia Stepanovna had been a widow for nine years. She was now thirty-five years old; she seemed young and handsome, and Volodya loved her tenderly. She lived entirely for her son, studied ancient languages for his sake, and shared all his school cares. A quiet and gentle woman, she looked somewhat apprehensively upon the world out of her large, benign eyes.
They had one domestic. Praskovya was a widow; she was gruff, sturdy, and strong; she was forty-five years old, but in her stern taciturnity she was more like a woman a hundred years old.
Whenever Volodya looked at her morose, stony face he wondered what she was thinking of in her kitchen during the long winter evenings, as the cold knitting-needles, clinking, shifted in her bony fingers with a regular movement, and her dry lips stirred yet uttered no sound. Was she recalling her drunken husband, or her children who had died earlier? or was she musing upon her lonely and homeless old age?
Her stony face seemed hopelessly gloomy and austere.