Alas, she was no longer that dominating woman who used to say so confidently: "I am going to Khotkov and will take the little orphans with me." The change was due, not to senile impotence alone, but also to an acquired sense of something better and truer. The last buffets of fortune had not only tamed Arina Petrovna; they had also lighted up some corners of her mental horizon into which her thoughts evidently had never before entered. Now, she knew, there were certain forces in the human being that can remain dormant a long while, but once awakened, they carry one irresistibly on to the glimmering ray of life, that cheering ray for whose appearance one's eyes have been yearning so long amidst the hopeless darkness of the present. Once realizing the legitimacy of such a striving, she was powerless to oppose it. It is true, she tried to dissuade her granddaughters from their purpose, but feebly, without conviction. She was uneasy about the future in store for them; all the more so since she herself had no connections in so-called "society." Yet she felt that the parting with the girls was a proper and inevitable thing. What would become of them? frequently pressed on her mind; but she was now fully aware that neither this question nor others more terrible would restrain one who was struggling for release from captivity. The girls insisted on one thing, on shaking the dust of Pogorelka from their feet. And finally, after some hesitating and postponing to please grandmother, they left. The Pogorelka manor-house was now steeped in a forlorn quiet. Self-centered as Arina Petrovna was by nature, yet the proximity of human breath had its calming effect even upon her. For the first time, perhaps, she felt that something had torn itself away from her being, and the freedom with which she herself was now confronted was so boundless that all she saw was empty space. To hide the void from her eyes, she ordered the state-rooms and the attic where the orphans had lived to be nailed up. "Incidentally, there will be less firewood burned," she said to herself. She retained only two rooms, in one of which a large ikon case with images was stowed away. The other was a combined bedroom, study and dining-room. For the sake of economy she dismissed her retinue of servants, retaining only her housekeeper Afimyushka, an old, broken-down woman, and Markovna, one-eyed, the soldier's wife, who did the cooking and washing. All these precautions, however, were of little help. The sensation of emptiness was not slow to penetrate into the two rooms that were meant to be guarded from it. Helpless solitude and dreary idleness were the two enemies Arina Petrovna now confronted. And she was to be bound to these two enemies the rest of her days. Physical and mental disintegration were not slow to follow in the wake of loneliness and idleness, and the less the resistance, the crueller, the more destructive its work.