some abomination.

Either because I did not steal as she did, or because I displayed
no desire to become her lover, which she probably looked upon as
an insult, or perhaps because she felt that I was a man of a different
order, she hated me from the first day. My inexperience, my appearance
--so unlike a flunkey--and my illness, seemed to her pitiful and
excited her disgust. I had a bad cough at that time, and sometimes
at night I prevented her from sleeping, as our rooms were only
divided by a wooden partition, and every morning she said to me:

"Again you didn't let me sleep. You ought to be in hospital instead
of in service."

She so genuinely believed that I was hardly a human being, but
something infinitely below her, that, like the Roman matrons who
were not ashamed to bathe before their slaves, she sometimes went
about in my presence in nothing but her chemise.

Once when I was in a happy, dreamy mood, I asked her at dinner (we
had soup and roast meat sent in from a restaurant every day)

"Polya, do you believe in God?"

"Why, of course!"

"Then," I went on, "you believe there will be a day of judgment,
and that we shall have to answer to God for every evil action?"

She gave me no reply, but simply made a contemptuous grimace, and,
looking that time at her cold eyes and over-fed expression, I
realised that for her complete and finished personality no God, no
conscience, no laws existed, and that if I had had to set fire to
the house, to murder or to rob, I could not have hired a better
accomplice.

In my novel surroundings I felt very uncomfortable for the first
week at Orlov's before I got used to being addressed as "thou," and
being constantly obliged to tell lies (saying "My master is not at
home" when he was). In my flunkey's swallow-tail I felt as though
I were in armour. But I grew accustomed to it in time. Like a genuine
footman, I waited at table, tidied the rooms, ran and drove about
on errands of all sorts. When Orlov did not want to keep an appointment
with Zinaida Fyodorovna, or when he forgot that he had promised to
go and see her, I drove to Znamensky Street, put a letter into her
hands and told a lie. And the result of it all was quite different
from what I had expected when I became a footman. Every day of this
new life of mine was wasted for me and my cause, as Orlov never
spoke of his father, nor did his visitors, and all I could learn
of the stateman's doings was, as before, what I