lived a simple, honest, easy
life; and that here everything was strange to him, that he could not
get accustomed to this life and accept it as inevitable, that it
displeased him, and that it aroused in him a calm determination to
rearrange it after his own model. His face was yellowish, with thin,
radiate wrinkles around his eyes, his voice low, and his hands always
warm. In greeting the mother he would enfold her entire hand in his
long, powerful fingers, and after such a vigorous hand clasp she felt
more at ease and lighter of heart.

Other people came from the city, oftenest among them a tall, well-built
young girl with large eyes set in a thin, pale face. She was called
Sashenka. There was something manly in her walk and movements; she
knit her thick, dark eyebrows in a frown, and when she spoke the thin
nostrils of her straight nose quivered.

She was the first to say, "We are socialists!" Her voice when she said
it was loud and strident.

When the mother heard this word, she stared in dumb fright into the
girl's face. But Sashenka, half closing her eyes, said sternly and
resolutely: "We must give up all our forces to the cause of the
regeneration of life; we must realize that we will receive no
recompense."

The mother understood that the socialists had killed the Czar. It had
happened in the days of her youth; and people had then said that the
landlords, wishing to revenge themselves on the Czar for liberating the
peasant serfs, had vowed not to cut their hair until the Czar should be
killed. These were the persons who had been called socialists. And
now she could not understand why it was that her son and his friends
were socialists.

When they had all departed, she asked Pavel:

"Pavlusha, are you a socialist?"

"Yes," he said, standing before her, straight and stalwart as always.
"Why?"

The mother heaved a heavy sigh, and lowering her eyes, said:

"So, Pavlusha? Why, they are against the Czar; they killed one."

Pavel walked up and down the room, ran his hand across his face, and,
smiling, said:

"We don't need to do that!"

He spoke to her for a long while in a low, serious voice. She looked
into his face and thought:

"He will do nothing bad; he is incapable of doing bad!"

And thereafter the terrible word was repeated with increasing
frequency; its sharpness wore off, and it became as familiar to her ear
as scores of other words unintelligible to her. But Sashenka did not
pl