d then I went away. I might have
married a girl from the town," he went on after a pause. "They say
a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a helpmate?
I help myself; I'd rather she talked to me, and not clack, clack,
clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good
conversation?"

Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his
dreary, monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo." This meant that he had seen
me.

Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure
in her conversations with Stepan. Stepan abused the peasants with
such sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him. Every
time she came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who
looked after the garden, shouted at her:

"Wench Palashka! Hulla, wench Palashka!" and he would bark like a
dog: "Ga! Ga!"

And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that
idiot's barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably
he attracted her in the same way as Stepan's abuse. At home some
piece of news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese
from the village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that
Larion had stolen the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would
say with a laugh:

"What do you expect of these people?"

She was indignant, and there was rancour in her heart, and meanwhile
I was growing used to the peasants, and I felt more and more drawn
to them. For the most part they were nervous, irritable, downtrodden
people; they were people whose imagination had been stifled, ignorant,
with a poor, dingy outlook on life, whose thoughts were ever the
same--of the grey earth, of grey days, of black bread, people who
cheated, but like birds hiding nothing but their head behind the
tree--people who could not count. They would not come to mow for
us for twenty roubles, but they came for half a pail of vodka,
though for twenty roubles they could have bought four pails. There
really was filth and drunkenness and foolishness and deceit, but
with all that one yet felt that the life of the peasants rested on
a firm, sound foundation. However uncouth a wild animal the peasant
following the plough seemed, and however he might stupefy himself
with vodka, still, looking at him more closely, one felt that there
was in him what was needed, something very important, which was
lacking in Masha and in the doctor, for instance, and that was that
he believed the chief thing o