to her Sofya’s manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her retainers: “It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.” Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The story is that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of explanation, she gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face, seized him by a tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and down. Then, without a word, she went straight to the cottage to the two boys. Seeing, at the first glance, that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she promptly gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and announcing that she would carry off both the children she wrapped them just as they were in a rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her own town. Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word, and when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for the orphans.” “You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she drove away. Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good thing, and did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to any proposition in regard to his children’s education. As for the slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town telling the story.