is way, and is too much of a fool (as you too must have seen) to find
it again. So I am very sorry for him. A good muzhik ought to be well
placed."

On the bell of the church there strikes the hour of two. Without
interrupting herself, the woman crosses her breast at each stroke.

"Always," she continues, "I feel sorry when I see a fine young fellow
going to the dogs. If I were able, I would take all such young men, and
restore them to the right road."

"Then you are not sorry FOR YOURSELF?"

"Not for myself? Oh yes, for myself as well."

"Then why flaunt yourself before this booby, as you have been doing?"

"Because I might reform him. Do you not think so? Ah, you do not know
me."

A sigh escapes her.

"He hit you, I think?" I venture.

"No, he did not. And in any case you are not to touch him."

"Yet you cried out?"

Suddenly she leans towards me, and says:

"Yes, he did strike me--he struck me on the breast, and would have
overpowered me had it not been that I cannot, I will not, do things
heartlessly, like a cat. Oh, the brutes that men can be!"

Here the conversation undergoes an interruption through the fact that
someone has come out to the hut door, and is whistling softly, as for a
dog.

"There he is!" whispers the woman.

"Then had I not best send him about his business?"

"No, no!" she exclaims, catching at my knees. "No need is there for
that, no need is there for that!"

Then with a low moan she adds:

"Oh Lord, how I pity our folk and their lives! Oh God our Father!"

Her shoulders heave, and presently she bursts into tears, with a
whisper, between the pitiful sobs, of:

"How, on such a night as this, one remembers all that one has ever
seen, and the folk that ever one has known! And oh, how wearisome,
wearisome it all is! And how I should like to cry throughout the
world--But to cry what? I know not--I have no message to deliver."

That feeling I can understand as well as she, for all too often has it
seemed to crush my soul with voiceless longing.

Then, as I stroke her bowed head and quivering shoulder, I ask her who
she is; and presently, on growing a little calmer, she tells me the
history of her life.

She is, it appears, the daughter of a carpenter and bee-keeper. On her
mother's death, this man married a young woman, and allowed her, as
stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a
convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till
adolesce