she gave him to Shatov for a minute to hold.
Marie signed to him on the sly as though afraid of Arina Prohorovna. He
understood at once and brought the baby to show her.

"How... pretty he is," she whispered weakly with a smile.

"Foo, what does he look like," Arina Prohorovna laughed gaily in
triumph, glancing at Shatov's face. "What a funny face!"

"You may be merry, Arina Prohorovna.... It's a great joy," Shatov
faltered with an expression of idiotic bliss, radiant at the phrase
Marie had uttered about the child.

"Where does the great joy come in?" said Arina Prohorovna
good-humouredly, bustling about, clearing up, and working like a
convict.

"The mysterious coming of a new creature, a great and inexplicable
mystery; and what a pity it is, Arina Prohorovna, that you don't
understand it."

Shatov spoke in an incoherent, stupefied and ecstatic way. Something
seemed to be tottering in his head and welling up from his soul apart
from his own will.

"There were two and now there's a third human being, a new spirit,
finished and complete, unlike the handiwork of man; a new thought and a
new love... it's positively frightening.... And there's nothing grander
in the world."

"Ech, what nonsense he talks! It's simply a further development of
the organism, and there's nothing else in it, no mystery," said Arina
Prohorovna with genuine and good-humoured laughter. "If you talk like
that, every fly is a mystery. But I tell you what: superfluous people
ought not to be born. We must first remould everything so that they
won't be superfluous and then bring them into the world. As it is, we
shall have to take him to the Foundling, the day after to-morrow....
Though that's as it should be."

"I will never let him go to the Foundling," Shatov pronounced
resolutely, staring at the floor.

"You adopt him as your son?"

"He is my son."

"Of course he is a Shatov, legally he is a Shatov, and there's no need
for you to pose as a humanitarian. Men can't get on without fine words.
There, there, it's all right, but look here, my friends," she added,
having finished clearing up at last, "it's time for me to go. I'll come
again this morning, and again in the evening if necessary, but now,
since everything has gone off so well, I must run off to my other
patients, they've been expecting me long ago. I believe you got an old
woman somewhere, Shatov; an old woman is all very well, but don't you,
her tender husband, desert her; s