Snow-storms--galloping snowy chargers--howled over the Steppe, the Volga, and the town. Elemental, all-devastating, as in the days of Stenka Razin--thundered the Revolution. The rooms in the ancient mansion were damp, dark and chilly. The old cathedral could be seen from the window, and down below lay the Volga, seven miles wide, wrapt in a dazzling sheet of snow, its steamers moored to their wharves. The family lived as a community at first, but their communism was nominal, for each barricaded and entrenched himself in his own room, with his own pot and samovar. They lived tedious, mean, malignant, worthless lives, execrating existence and the Revolution; they lived utterly apart from the turmoil that now replaced the placid even flow of the old regime: they were outside current events, and their thoughts for ever turned back to the past, awaiting its return. General Kirill Lvovich awoke at seven o'clock. Everything was crowded closely together in the room, which was bedroom, drawing-room and dining-room combined. The blue dusk of morning was visible through the heavy blinds of the low window. The general put on his tasselled Bukhara dressing-gown and went outside, then returned coughing hoarsely. "Anna," he snarled, "ask your kinsfolk which of them left the place in such a state. Don't they know we have no servants? It is your turn to set the samovar to-day. Are there no cigarette boxes?" he walked about the room, his hands behind his back, diamond rings glittering on his fingers. "And it is your turn to go for the rations," retorted Anna Andreevna. "That will do, I know it. There are four families living in the house and they cannot organise themselves so as to go in turn for the rations. Give me a sheet of paper and some ink." The general sat down at the table and wrote out a notice: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have no servants; We must see to things ourselves. We can't all perch like eagles, therefore, I beg you to be more careful. Kirill L. Lezhner." Kirill Lvovich was not one of the heirs, it was his wife who came of the Rastorov family, and he had merely accompanied her to the ancestral mansion. Lvovich took his notice and hung it on the lavatory door. Then again he paced the floor, his jewels sparkling brilliantly. "Why the devil do Sergius and his family occupy three rooms, and we only one?" he grumbled. "I shall leave this den. They don't behave like relatives! Are there no cigarettes?" Anna Andreevna, a quiet, weary, feeble woman, replied tonelessly: "You know there are none. But I will look for some butt-ends in a moment. Lina sometimes throws away the unused cigarette wraps." "What bourgeois they are--throwing away fag-ends and keeping servants!" her husband complained.