you I
told the simple truth. Who should know if not I? After that perhaps you
won't believe that our neighbour, Madame Tchepuz, Elena Antonovna, told
me herself, mind _herself_, that she had murdered her nephew?'

'What an invention!'

'Wait a minute, wait a minute! Listen and judge for yourselves. Mind,
I don't want to slander her, I even like her as far as one can like a
woman. She hasn't a single book in her house except a calendar, and she
can't read except aloud, and that exercise throws her into a violent
perspiration, and she complains then that her eyes feel bursting out of
her head.... In short, she's a capital woman, and her servant girls grow
fat. Why should I slander her?'

'You see,' observed Darya Mihailovna, 'African Semenitch has got on his
hobbyhorse, now he will not be off it to-night.'

'My hobby! But women have three at least, which they are never off,
except, perhaps, when they're asleep.'

'What three hobbies are those?'

'Reproof, reproach, recrimination.'

'Do you know, African Semenitch,' began Darya Mihailovna, 'you cannot be
so bitter against women for nothing. Some woman or other must have----'

'Done me an injury, you mean?' Pigasov interrupted.

Darya Mihailovna was rather embarrassed; she remembered Pigasov's
unlucky marriage, and only nodded.

'One woman certainly did me an injury,' said Pigasov, 'though she was a
good, very good one.'

'Who was that?'

'My mother,' said Pigasov, dropping his voice.

'Your mother? What injury could she have done you?'

'She brought me into the world.'

Darya Mihailovna frowned.

'Our conversation,' she said, 'seems to have taken a gloomy turn.
_Constantin_, play us Thalberg's new _etude_. I daresay the music will
soothe African Semenitch. Orpheus soothed savage beasts.'

Konstantin Diomiditch took his seat at the piano, and played the etude
very fairly well. Natalya Alexyevna at first listened attentively, then
she bent over her work again.

'_Merci, c'est charmant_,' observed Darya Mihailovna, 'I love Thalberg.
_Il est si distingue_. What are you thinking of, African Semenitch?'

'I thought,' began African Semenitch slowly, 'that there are three kinds
of egoists; the egoists who live themselves and let others live; the
egoists who live themselves and don't let others live; and the egoists
who don't live themselves and don't let others live. Women, for the most
part, belong to the third class.'

'That's polite! I am very much ast