Book 2 Chapter 3 Old Associations

From Kousminski Nekhludoff went to the estate he had inherited
from his aunts, the same where he first met Katusha. He meant to
arrange about the land there in the way he had done in
Kousminski. Besides this, he wished to find out all he could
about Katusha and her baby, and when and how it had died. He got
to Panovo early one morning, and the first thing that struck him
when he drove up was the look of decay and dilapidation that all
the buildings bore, especially the house itself. The iron roofs,
which had once been painted green, looked red with rust, and a
few sheets of iron were bent back, probably by a storm. Some of
the planks which covered the house from outside were torn away in
several places; these were easier to get by breaking the rusty
nails that held them. Both porches, but especially the side porch
he remembered so well, were rotten and broken; only the banister
remained. Some of the windows were boarded up, and the building
in which the foreman lived, the kitchen, the stables--all were
grey and decaying. Only the garden had not decayed, but had
grown, and was in full bloom; from over the fence the cherry,
apple, and plum trees looked like white clouds. The lilac bushes
that formed the hedge were in full bloom, as they had been when,
14 years ago, Nekhludoff had played gorelki with the 15-year-old
Katusha, and had fallen and got his hand stung by the nettles
behind one of those lilac bushes. The larch that his aunt Sophia
had planted near the house, which then was only a short stick,
had grown into a tree, the trunk of which would have made a beam,
and its branches were covered with soft yellow green needles as
with down. The river, now within its banks, rushed noisily over
the mill dam. The meadow the other side of the river was dotted
over by the peasants' mixed herds. The foreman, a student, who
had left the seminary without finishing the course, met
Nekhludoff in the yard, with a smile on his face, and, still
smiling, asked him to come into the office, and, as if promising
something exceptionally good by this smile, he went behind a
partition. For a moment some whispering was heard behind the
partition. The isvostchik who had driven Nekhludoff from the
station, drove away after receiving a tip, and all was silent.
Then a barefooted girl passed the window; she had on an
embroidered peasant blouse, and long earrings in her ears; then a
man walked past, clattering with his nailed boots on the trodden
path.