Read "The Old House" by Fyodor Sologub online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In the meantime Elena Kirillovna kneels down with a sigh before the icon in her bedroom. She prays a long time. Conscientiously she repeats all the prayers she knows. Her dry, raspberry-coloured lips stir slightly. Her face has a severe, concentrated expression. All her wrinkles seem also austere, weary, callous.
There are many words in her prayers -- holy, lofty, touching words. But because of their frequent repetition their meaning has become, as it were, hardened, stereotyped and ordinary; the tears which appear in her eyes are habitual tears wrung out by her antique emotion, and have no relation to the secret trepidation of impossible hopes which have stolen into the old woman's heart of late.