Other things to add to the misery of this miserable existence of Arina Petrovna's were the poor food she ate and the discomfort of her home. She ate little and used poor food, wishing, probably, to make up for the loss caused by insufficient supervision. And the Pogorelka manor-house was dilapidated and damp. The room into which Arina Petrovna locked herself was never ventilated and remained without cleaning for weeks on end. In this complete helplessness and the absence of all comfort and care, decrepitude began slowly to set in. But her desire to live grew stronger, or, rather, her desire for "a dainty bit" asserted itself. With this came coupled a total absence of the thought of death. Previously, she had been afraid of death; now she seemed to have quite forgotten about it. And with ideals of life differing but little from a peasant's, her conception of a "comfortable life" was of rather a base kind. Everything she had formerly denied herself, dainties, rest, association with wide-awake people, now forced itself upon her in an insistent craving. All the propensities of a regular sponger and hanger-on, idle talk, subservience for the sake of a prospective gift, gluttony, grew in her with astounding rapidity. Like the servants, she fed on cabbage-soup and cured bacon of doubtful quality, and at the same time dreamed of the stores of provisions at Golovliovo, of the German carps that swarmed in the Dubrovino ponds, of the mushrooms that filled the Golovliovo woods, of the fowl that fattened in the Golovliovo poultry-yard.
"Some soup with giblets, or some garden-cress in cream would not be a bad thing," would cross her mind so vividly that her mouth watered. At night when she tossed about rigid with fright at the least rustling, she would think: "Yes, at Golovliovo the locks are secure and the watchmen reliable. They keep banging on the steel plates all the time, and you can sleep in perfect safety." During the day, from sheer lack of human companionship, she was compelled to be silent for hours, and during these spells of compulsory taciturnity, she could not help thinking: "At Golovliovo there are lots of people. There you can talk your troubles away." In fact, Golovliovo kept constantly recurring to her mind, and the reminiscences of her former estate became a radiant spot in which "comfortable living" concentrated itself.