Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/447

 "Thank you," replied the old man, taking the cup, but refusing the sugar, pointing to the lumps which lay in front of him.

"How can you get along with hired men?" said he. "It is ruinous. Here's Sviazhsky, for example. We know what splendid land.... but they don't get decent crops, all from lack of care."

"Yes; but how do you do with your workmen?"

"It's all among ourselves. We watch everything. Lazybones, off they go! We work with our own hands."

"Batyushka, Finogen wants you to give him the tar-water," said the woman in galoshes, looking in through the door.

"So it is, sir," said the old man, rising; and, having crossed himself many times before the ikons or sacred pictures, he once more thanked Levin, and left the room.

When Levin went into the dark izba to give orders to his coachman, he found all the "men-folks" sitting down to dinner. The peasant women were on their feet helping. The healthy-looking young son, with his mouth full of kasha- gruel, got off some joke, and all broke into loud guffaws; and more hilariously than the others laughed the woman in galoshes, who was pouring shchi, or cabbage soup, into a cup.

It well might be that the jolly face of the woman in the galoshes cooperated powerfully with the whole impression of orderliness which this peasant home produced on Levin; but the impression was so strong that Levin could never get rid of it; and all the way from the old man's to Sviazhsky's, again and again he thought of what he had seen at the farm-house as something deserving special attention.