If I had money, I bought some cakes, and we had tea, afterward cooling the samovar with cold water, lest the scolding mother of Ludmilla should guess that it had been heated. Sometimes grandmother came to see us, and sat down, making lace, sewing, or telling us wonderful stories, and when grandfather went to the town, Ludmilla used to come to us, and we feasted without a care in the world. Grandmother said: "Oh, how happily we live! With our own money we can do what we like." She encouraged our friendship. "It is a good thing when a boy and girl are friends. Only there must be no tricks," and she explained in the simplest words what she meant by "tricks." She spoke beautifully, as one inspired, and made me understand thoroughly that it is wrong to pluck the flower before it opens, for then it will have neither fragrance nor fruit. We had no inclination for "tricks," but that did not hinder Ludmilla and me from speaking of that subject, on which one is supposed to be silent. Such subjects of conversation were in a way forced upon us because the relationship of the sexes was so often and tiresomely brought to our notice in their coarsest form, and was very offensive to us. Ludmilla's father was a handsome man of forty, curly-headed and whiskered, and had an extremely masterful way of moving his eyebrows. He was strangely silent; I do not remember one word uttered by him. When he caressed his children he uttered unintelligible sounds, like a dumb person, and even when he beat his wife he did it in silence. On the evenings of Sundays and festivals, attired in a light-blue shirt, with wide plush trousers and highly polished boots, he would go out to the gate with a harmonica slung with straps behind his back, and stand there exactly like a soldier doing sentry duty. Presently a sort of "promenade" would begin past our gate. One after the other girls and women would pass, glancing at Evsyenko furtively from under their eyelashes, or quite openly, while he stood sticking out his lower lip, and also looking with discriminating glances from, his dark eyes. There was something repugnantly dog-like in this silent conversation with the eyes alone, and from the slow, rapt movement of the women as they passed it seemed as if the chosen one, at an imperious flicker of the man's eyelid, would humbly sink to the dirty ground as if she were killed. "Tipsy brute! Brazen face!" grumbled Ludmilla's mother. She was a tall, thin woman, with a long face and a bad-complexion, and hair which had been cut short after typhus. She was like a worn-out broom. Ludmilla sat beside her, unsuccessfully trying to turn her attention from the street by asking questions about one thing and another. "Stop it, you monster!" muttered the mother, blinking restlessly. Her narrow Mongol eyes were strangely bright and immovable, always fixed on something and always stationary.