In the dark, windowless bedroom, in addition to the wide bed, there were trunks and cupboards from which came the odors of leaf tobacco and Persian camomile. These three rooms were always unoccupied, while the entire household squeezed itself into the little dining-room. Directly after breakfast, at eight o'clock, the master and his brother moved the table, and, laying sheets of white paper upon it, with cases, pencils, and saucers containing Indian ink, set to work, one at each end of the table. The table was shaky, and took up nearly the whole of the room, and when the mistress and the nurse came out of the nursery they had to brush past the corners. "Don't come fussing about here!" Victor would cry. "Vassia, please tell him not to shout at me," the mistress would say to her husband in an offended tone. "All right; but don't come and shake the table," her husband would reply peaceably. "I am stout, and the room is so small." "Well, we will go and work in the large drawingroom." But at that she cried indignantly: "Lord! why on earth should you work in the large drawing-room?" At the door of the closet appeared the angry face of Matrena Ivanovna, flushed with the heat of the stove. She called out: "You see how it is, Vassia? She knows that you are working, and yet she can't be satisfied with the other four rooms." Victor laughed maliciously, but the master said: "That will do!" And the daughter-in-law, with a venomously eloquent gesture, sank into a chair and groaned: "I am dying! I am dying!" "Don't hinder my work, the devil take you!" roared the master, turning pale with the exertion. "This is nothing better than a mad-house. Here am I breaking my back to feed you. Oh, you wild fowl!" At first these quarrels used to alarm me, especially when the mistress, seizing a table knife, rushed into the closet, and, shutting both the doors, began to shriek like a mad thing. For a minute the house was quiet, then the master, having tried to force the door, stooped down, and called out to me: "Climb up on my back and unfasten the hook." I swiftly jumped on his back, and broke the pane of glass over the door; but when I bent down, the mistress hit me over the head with the blade of the knife. However, I succeeded in opening the door, and the master, dragging his wife into the dining-room after a struggle, took the knife away from her. As I sat in the kitchen rubbing my bruised head, I soon came to the conclusion that I had suffered for nothing. The knife was so blunt that it would hardly cut a piece of bread, and it would certainly never have made an incision in any one's skin. Besides, there had been no need for me to climb on the master's back. I could have broken the glass by standing on a chair, and in any case it would have been easier for a grown person to have unfastened the hook, since his arms would have been longer. After that episode the quarrels in the house ceased to alarm me.