nce, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain
amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a
friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as forester on
the convent's estate.

As the woman relates this, I feel vexed that I cannot see her
face--only a dim, round blur amid which there looms what appears to be
a pair of closed eyes. Also, so complete is the stillness, that she can
narrate her story in a barely audible whisper; and I gain the
impression that the pair of us are sitting plunged in a void of
darkness where life does not exist, yet where we are destined to begin
life.

"However, the man was a libertine and a drunkard, and many a riotous
night did he spend with his cronies in the porter's lodge of the
convent. Also, he tried to arouse a similar taste in myself; and though
for a time I resisted the tendency, I at length, on his taking to
beating me, yielded. Only for one man, however, had I really a liking;
and with him it was, and not with my husband, that I first learnt the
meaning of spousehood.... Unfortunately, my lover himself was
married; and in time his wife came to hear of me, and procured my
husband's dismissal. The chief reason was that the lady, a person of
great wealth, was herself handsome, albeit stout, and did not care to
see her place assumed by a nobody. Next, my husband died of drink; and
as my father had long been dead, and I found myself alone, I went to
see and consult my stepmother. All that she said, however, was: 'Why
come to me? Go and think things out for yourself.' And I too then
reflected: 'Yes, why should I have gone to her?' and repaired to the
convent. Yet even there there seemed to be no place left for me, and
eventually old Mother Taisia, who had once been my governess, said:
'Tatiana, do you return to the world, for there, and only there, will
you have a chance of happiness. So to the world I returned--and still
am roaming it."

"Your quest of happiness is not following an easy road!"

"It is following the road that it best can."

By now the darkness has ceased to keep spread over us, as it were, the
stretched web of a heavy curtain, but has grown thinner and more
transparent with the tension, save that, in places (for instance, in
the window of the hut), it still lies in thick folds or clots as it
peers at us with its sightless eyes.

Over the hummock-like roofs of the huts rise the church's steeple and
the poplar tree