Nadejda Nicolaievna by Vsevolod Garshin

Another three or four sittings passed by. Nadejda Nicolaievna used to come to me at ten or eleven o'clock, and remain until it was dark. Time and again I begged her to stay and have dinner with us, but as soon as the sitting was ended she invariably hurried off into the next room, changed the dark blue dress for her black dress, and left.

Her face changed greatly during these few days. A melancholy and wistful expression became noticeable about her mouth and in the depths of her grey eyes. She seldom spoke to me, and only brightened up a little when Helfreich, who continued -- in spite of my efforts to make him take up something seriously -- to paint one cat after another, sat in the studio at his easel. Besides his ginger model, some five or six cats of various ages, sex, and colour appeared from somewhere in our flat, which Agatha Alexeievna invariably fed, although she waged a never-ending war with them, consisting principally in taking several of them up under her arm and throwing them out on to the backstairs. But the cats used to mew piteously at the door, and the soft heart of our faithful domestic could not withstand such appeals; the door would open, and the models again take possession of our flat.