The servants called her Christina Dmitryevna, and Korolyov guessed that this was the governess. Beside her stood a personage with short hair and a pince-nez she was wearing a blouse of many colours, and was very thin and no longer young. Madame Lyalikov - a stout elderly lady wearing a black silk dress with fashionable sleeves, but, judging from her face, a simple uneducated woman - looked at the doctor in a flutter, and could not bring herself to hold out her hand to him she did not dare.
"Please come in, doctor," said women's voices in the passage and the entry, and at the same time he heard sighs and whisperings. The coachman suddenly pulled up the horses, and the carriage stopped at the house, which had been newly painted grey here was a flower garden, with a lilac bush covered with dust, and on the yellow steps at the front door there was a strong smell of paint. Here and there, like oases in the desert, there were pitiful gardens, and the green and red roofs of the houses in which the managers and clerks lived. It was a wide courtyard without grass, with five immense blocks of buildings with tall chimneys a little distance one from another, warehouses and barracks, and over everything a sort of grey powder as though from dust.
"Look out!" shouted the coachman, not pulling up the horses. On each side he caught glimpses of the little houses of workpeople, of the faces of women, of quilts and linen on the railings. And now when the workpeople timidly and respectfully made way for the carriage, in their faces, their caps, their walk, he read physical impurity, drunkenness, nervous exhaustion, bewilderment. He was born and had grown up in Moscow he did not know the country, and he had never taken any interest in factories, or been inside one, but he had happened to read about factories, and had been in the houses of manufacturers and had talked to them and whenever he saw a factory far or near, he always thought how quiet and peaceable it was outside, but within there was always sure to be impenetrable ignorance and dull egoism on the side of the owners, wearisome, unhealthy toil on the side of the workpeople, squabbling, vermin, vodka. And he was charmed with the evening, the farmhouses and villas on the road, and the birch-trees, and the quiet atmosphere all around, when the fields and woods and the sun seemed preparing, like the workpeople now on the eve of the holiday, to rest, and perhaps to pray. It was Saturday evening the sun was setting, the workpeople were coming in crowds from the factory to the station, and they bowed to the carriage in which Korolyov was driving. A carriage with three horses had been sent to the station to meet Korolyov the coachman wore a hat with a peacock's feather on it, and answered every question in a loud voice like a soldier: "No, sir!" "Certainly, sir!" It was two stations from Moscow, and there was a drive of three miles from the station. And the Professor did not go himself, but sent instead his assistant, Korolyov. The daughter of some Madame Lyalikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was ill, and that was all that one could make out of the long, incoherent telegram. THE Professor received a telegram from the Lyalikovs' factory he was asked to come as quickly as possible.
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