They lived together in this way for more than forty years, and it never occurred to either of them that there was anything unnatural in such a life. Time did not diminish Vladimir Mikhailych's quarrelsomeness; on the contrary, it took on a still sharper edge. Apart from the poetical exercising in Barkov's spirit that he did, he began to drink and to lie in wait eagerly for the servant girls in the corridors. At first Arina Petrovna looked on this new occupation of her husband's with repugnance. She even got wrought up over it, not so much from jealousy as that she felt it to be an interference with her authority. After a while, however, she shrugged her shoulders, and merely watched out that the "dirty wenches" should not fetch brandy for their master. From that time on, having said to herself once for all that her husband was not a companion, she directed her efforts exclusively to one object, the building up of the estate. And in the forty years of her married life she actually succeeded in multiplying her property tenfold. With astonishing patience and acumen she kept her eye on the near and distant villages, found out in secret ways the relations that existed between the neighboring landowners and the board of trustees, and always appeared at the auctions like snow on the head. In this fantastic hunt for new acquisitions Vladimir Mikhailych receded more and more into the background, turned seedy and at last dropped out of social life completely. He was now a decrepit old man already, keeping his bed almost the whole time. On the rare occasions that he left his room it was only to stick his head through the half-open door of his wife's bedroom and shout: "Devil!" After which he would go back and close himself up in his own room again. Arina Petrovna was not much happier in her children. She was of a celibate nature, so to speak, independent and self-sufficient, and her children were nothing to her but a useless burden. The only times when she breathed freely was when she was alone with her accounts and her household affairs, and when no one interfered with her business talks with her managers, stewards, housekeepers, and so on. In her eyes, children were one of the preordained things in life that she felt she had no right to protest against. Nevertheless they did not touch a single chord in her inner being, which was given over wholly to the numberless details of the household. There were four children, one daughter and three sons. Of the oldest son and the daughter she did not even like to speak; toward the youngest son she was indifferent. It was only for the middle one, Porfisha, that she cherished any feeling at all, a feeling not of love, but of something very akin to fear.