him with great uneasiness.

"Are you aware, Stepan Trofimovitch?..."

_"Comment, vous savez deja mon nom?"_ He smiled with delight.

"I heard it this morning from Anisim Ivanovitch when you were talking to
him. But I venture to tell you for my part..."

And she whispered hurriedly to him, looking nervously at the closed
door for fear anyone should overhear--that here in this village, it was
dreadful. That though all the peasants were fishermen, they made their
living chiefly by charging travellers every summer whatever they
thought fit. The village was not on the high road but an out-of-the-way
one, and people only called there because the steamers stopped there,
and that when the steamer did not call--and if the weather was in the
least unfavourable, it would not--then numbers of travellers would be
waiting there for several days, and all the cottages in the village
would be occupied, and that was just the villagers' opportunity, for
they charged three times its value for everything--and their landlord
here was proud and stuck up because he was, for these parts, very rich;
he had a net which had cost a thousand roubles.

Stepan Trofimovitch looked almost reproachfully at Sofya Matveyevna's
extremely excited face, and several times he made a motion to stop her.
But she persisted and said all she had to say: she said she had been
there before already in the summer "with a very genteel lady from the
town," and stayed there too for two whole days till the steamer came,
and what they had to put up with did not bear thinking of. "Here, Stepan
Trofimovitch, you've been pleased to ask for this room for yourself
alone.... I only speak to warn you.... In the other room there are
travellers already. An elderly man and a young man and a lady with
children, and by to-morrow before two o'clock the whole house will be
filled up, for since the steamer hasn't been here for two days it will
be sure to come to-morrow. So for a room apart and for ordering dinner,
and for putting out the other travellers, they'll charge you a price
unheard of even in the capital...."

But he was in distress, in real distress. "_Assez, mon enfant,_ I beseech
you, _nous avons notre argent--et apres, le bon Dieu._ And I am surprised
that, with the loftiness of your ideas, you... _Assez, assez, vous me
tourmentez,_" he articulated hysterically, "we have all our future before
us, and you... you fill me with alarm for the future."

He proceeded at once to