Next morning, before the usual hour for paying calls, there tripped from the portals of an orange-coloured wooden house with an attic storey and a row of blue pillars a lady in an elegant plaid cloak.

With her came a footman in a many-caped greatcoat and a polished top hat with a gold band.

Hastily, but gracefully, the lady ascended the steps let down from a koliaska which was standing before the entrance, and as soon as she had done so the footman shut her in, put up the steps again, and, catching hold of the strap behind the vehicle, shouted to the coachman, "Right away!" The reason of all this was that the lady was the possessor of a piece of intelligence that she was burning to communicate to a fellow-creature.

Every moment she kept looking out of the carriage window, and perceiving, with almost speechless vexation, that, as yet, she was but half-way on her journey.

The fronts of the houses appeared to her longer than usual, and in particular did the front of the white stone hospital, with its rows of narrow windows, seem interminable to a degree which at length forced her to ejaculate: "Oh, the cursed building! Positively there is no end to it!" Also, she twice adjured the coachman with the words, "Go quicker, Andrusha! You are a horribly long time over the journey this morning." But at length the goal was reached, and the koliaska stopped before a one-storied wooden mansion, dark grey in colour, and having white carvings over the windows, a tall wooden fence and narrow garden in front of the latter, and a few meagre trees looming white with an incongruous coating of road dust.