ce!"

"What is there for me to do there?"

"Of course there is nothing for you to do... though to be sure... there
is the place to look after.... To see how things are going.... You are
the master.... I say, you have shot a blackcock, Yegor Vlassitch! You
ought to sit down and rest!"

As she said all this Pelagea laughed like a silly girl and looked up at
Yegor's face. Her face was simply radiant with happiness.

"Sit down? If you like..." said Yegor in a tone of indifference, and he
chose a spot between two fir-trees. "Why are you standing? You sit down
too."

Pelagea sat a little way off in the sun and, ashamed of her joy, put her
hand over her smiling mouth. Two minutes passed in silence.

"You might come for once," said Pelagea.

"What for?" sighed Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead
with his hand. "There is no object in my coming. To go for an hour
or two is only waste of time, it's simply upsetting you, and to live
continually in the village my soul could not endure.... You know
yourself I am a pampered man.... I want a bed to sleep in, good tea to
drink, and refined conversation.... I want all the niceties, while you
live in poverty and dirt in the village.... I couldn't stand it for a
day. Suppose there were an edict that I must live with you, I should
either set fire to the hut or lay hands on myself. From a boy I've had
this love for ease; there is no help for it."

"Where are you living now?"

"With the gentleman here, Dmitry Ivanitch, as a huntsman. I furnish
his table with game, but he keeps me... more for his pleasure than
anything."

"That's not proper work you're doing, Yegor Vlassitch.... For other
people it's a pastime, but with you it's like a trade... like real
work."

"You don't understand, you silly," said Yegor, gazing gloomily at the
sky. "You have never understood, and as long as you live you will never
understand what sort of man I am.... You think of me as a foolish man,
gone to the bad, but to anyone who understands I am the best shot there
is in the whole district. The gentry feel that, and they have even
printed things about me in a magazine. There isn't a man to be compared
with me as a sportsman.... And it is not because I am pampered and proud
that I look down upon your village work. From my childhood, you know, I
have never had any calling apart from guns and dogs. If they took away
my gun, I used to go out with the fishing-hook, if they took the hook I