ed to give me up in despair, and
took no further trouble with me, yet I could not bring myself to treat
him with indifference. Every time that our eyes met I felt that my
look expressed only too plainly my dislike, and, though I tried hard
to assume a careless air, he seemed to divine my hypocrisy, until I was
forced to blush and turn away.

In short, it was a terrible trial to me to have anything to do with him.

XVIII. THE MAIDSERVANTS' ROOM

I BEGAN to feel more and more lonely, until my chief solace lay in
solitary reflection and observation. Of the favourite subject of
my reflections I shall speak in the next chapter. The scene where I
indulged in them was, for preference, the maidservants' room, where
a plot suitable for a novel was in progress--a plot which touched and
engrossed me to the highest degree. The heroine of the romance was, of
course, Masha. She was in love with Basil, who had known her before she
had become a servant in our house, and who had promised to marry her
some day. Unfortunately, fate, which had separated them five years ago,
and afterwards reunited them in Grandmamma's abode, next proceeded to
interpose an obstacle between them in the shape of Masha's uncle, our
man Nicola, who would not hear of his niece marrying that "uneducated
and unbearable fellow," as he called Basil. One effect of the obstacle
had been to make the otherwise slightly cool and indifferent Basil fall
as passionately in love with Masha as it is possible for a man to be
who is only a servant and a tailor, wears a red shirt, and has his hair
pomaded. Although his methods of expressing his affection were odd (for
instance, whenever he met Masha he always endeavoured to inflict upon
her some bodily pain, either by pinching her, giving her a slap with his
open hand, or squeezing her so hard that she could scarcely breathe),
that affection was sincere enough, and he proved it by the fact that,
from the moment when Nicola refused him his niece's hand, his grief led
him to drinking, and to frequenting taverns, until he proved so
unruly that more than once he had to be sent to undergo a humiliating
chastisement at the police-station.

Nevertheless, these faults of his and their consequences only served to
elevate him in Masha's eyes, and to increase her love for him. Whenever
he was in the hands of the police, she would sit crying the whole day,
and complain to Gasha of her hard fate (Gasha played an active part
in the