Nekhludoff turned to the woman, Anisia.

"How do you fare?" he asked. "What do you live on?"

"How do I live? I sometimes get some food," and she began to sob.

The grave face of the child, however, spread into a broad smile, and
its thin legs began to wriggle.

Nekhludoff produced his pocketbook and gave the woman ten rubles. He
had scarcely made ten steps when he was overtaken by another woman
with a child; then an old woman, and again another woman. They all
spoke of their poverty and implored his help. Nekhludoff distributed
the sixty rubles that were in his pocketbook and returned home, i. e.,
to the wing inhabited by the clerk. The clerk, smiling, met Nekhludoff
with the information that the peasants would gather in the evening,
as he had ordered. Nekhludoff thanked him and strolled about the
garden, meditating on what he had seen. "The people are dying in large
numbers, and are used to it; they have acquired modes of living
natural to a people who are becoming extinct--the death of children,
exhausting toil for women, insufficiency of food for all, especially
for the aged--all comes and is received naturally. They were reduced
to this condition gradually, so that they cannot see the horror of it,
and bear it uncomplainingly. Afterward, we, too, come to consider this
condition natural; that it ought to be so."

All this was so clear to him now that he could not cease wondering how
it was that people could not see it; that he himself could not see
that which is so patent. It was perfectly clear that children and old
people were dying for want of milk, and they had no milk because they
had not land enough to feed the cattle and also raise bread and hay.
And he devised a scheme by which he was to give the land to the
people, and they were to pay an annual rent which was to go to the
community, to be used for common utilities and taxes. This was not the
single-tax, but it was the nearest approach to it under present
conditions. The important part consisted in that he renounced his
right to own land.

When he returned to the house, the clerk, with a particularly happy
smile on his face, offered him dinner, expressing his fear that it
might spoil.

The table was covered with a gloomy cloth, an embroidered towel
serving as a napkin, and on the table, in vieux-saxe, stood a
soup-bowl with a broken handle, filled with potato soup and containing
the same rooster that he had seen carried into the house on his
arr