s good, mother! You have no idea
HOW good it is! Both for Pavel and all who were arrested with him!"

He snapped his fingers in ecstasy, whistled, and fairly doubled over,
all radiant with joy. His delight evoked a vigorous response from the
mother.

"My dear, my Andriusha!" she began, as if her heart had burst open, and
gushed over merrily with a limpid stream of living words full of serene
joy. "I've thought all my life, 'Lord Christ in heaven! what did I
live for?' Beatings, work! I saw nothing except my husband. I knew
nothing but fear! And how Pasha grew I did not see, and I hardly know
whether I loved him when my husband was alive. All my concerns, all my
thoughts were centered upon one thing--to feed my beast, to propitiate
the master of my life with enough food, pleasing to his palate, and
served on time, so as not to incur his displeasure, so as to escape the
terrors of a beating, to get him to spare me but once! But I do not
remember that he ever did spare me. He beat me so--not as a wife is
beaten, but as one whom you hate and detest. Twenty years I lived like
that, and what was up to the time of my marriage I do not recall. I
remember certain things, but I see nothing! I am as a blind person.
Yegor Ivanovich was here--we are from the same village--and he spoke
about this and about that. I remember the houses, the people, but how
they lived, what they spoke about, what happened to this one and what
to that one--I forget, I do not see! I remember fires--two fires. It
seems that everything has been beaten out of me, that my soul has been
locked up and sealed tight. It's grown blind, it does not hear!"

Her quick-drawn breath was almost a sob. She bent forward, and
continued in a lowered voice: "When my husband died I turned to my
son; but he went into this business, and I was seized with a pity for
him, such a yearning pity--for if he should perish, how was I to live
alone? What dread, what fright I have undergone! My heart was rent
when I thought of his fate.

"Our woman's love is not a pure love! We love that which we need. And
here are you! You are grieving about your mother. What do you want
her for? And all the others go and suffer for the people, they go to
prison, to Siberia, they die for them, many are hung. Young girls walk
alone at night, in the snow, in the mud, in the rain. They walk seven
versts from the city to our place. Who drives them? Who pursues them?
They love!