And immediately she took up the song at the very place she had left off. Larissa said amiably: "Let her sing." "It's raining hard on me, There's no roof for a girl like me--" bawled Darya, imitating the sounds and drawing out the syllables as the simple folk-singers do to make a song more pathetic. For example, it sounded like this: "O-o-oh; it's a-rai-ai-ning ha-a-a-rd on me-e-e!" Particularly unpleasant were the sounds stretched out where the accents did not fall. It produced a superlative impression: it would have brought a mortal depression on a new listener. A sadness resounding through our native fields and villages, a sadness consuming with a hideous flame the living word, debasing a once living song with senseless howling.... Suddenly Darya sprang up, put her hand on her hips and began to shout out a gay song,[3] dancing and snapping her fingers: "Go away, young fellow, go away-- I am a robber's daughter A fig for your good looks-- I'll stick a knife in your belly. I'll not have a muzhik. I'm going to love a bossiak."[4] Darya danced and sang, and her eyes seemed as motionless as the dead moon in its orbit. Liudmilla laughed loudly--and her heart now felt faint, now felt oppressed, from gay joyousness or from the cherry-sweet cherry brandy. Valeria laughed quietly with glass-sounding laughter, and looked enviously at her sisters; she wished she were as cheerful as they, but somehow she felt anything but cheerful--she thought that she was the last, the youngest, "the left-over"; hence her frailty and her unhappiness. And though she was laughing she was almost on the point of bursting into tears. Larissa looked at her, and winked--and Valeria suddenly grew more cheerful. Larissa rose, and moved her shoulders--presently, in a single instant, all four sisters were whirling round madly, as in a mystic dance, and, following Darya's lead, were shouting new _chastushki,_ one more gay and absurd than the other. The sisters were young, handsome, and their voices sounded loud and wild--the witches on the Bald hill might have envied this mad whirl. All night Liudmilla dreamt such sultry African dreams! Now she dreamt that she was lying in a smotheringly hot room, and her bedcover slipping from her left her hot body naked--and then a scaly, ringed serpent crept into the room, and climbing up a tree coiled itself round the branches of its naked, handsome limbs.... Then she dreamt of a hot summer evening by a lake under threatening, cumbrously-moving clouds--she was lying on its bank, naked, with a smooth golden crown across her forehead. There was a smell of tepid stagnant water and of grass withered by the heat--and upon the dark, ominous, calm water floated a white, powerful swan of regal stateliness. He beat the water noisily with his wings, and, hissing loudly, approached her and embraced her--and it felt delicious, and languorous and sad....