learning, and I
assented to all she said, though by now I disliked her doctor. She
wanted to work, to lead an independent life on her own account, and
she used to say that she would become a school-teacher or a doctor'
s assistant as soon as her health would permit her, and would herself
do the scrubbing and the washing. Already she was passionately
devoted to her child; he was not yet born, but she knew already the
colour of his eyes, what his hands would be like, and how he would
laugh. She was fond of talking about education, and as her Vladimir
was the best man in the world, all her discussion of education could
be summed up in the question how to make the boy as fascinating as
his father. There was no end to her talk, and everything she said
made her intensely joyful. Sometimes I was delighted, too, though
I could not have said why.

I suppose her dreaminess infected me. I, too, gave up reading, and
did nothing but dream. In the evenings, in spite of my fatigue, I
walked up and down the room, with my hands in my pockets, talking
of Masha.

"What do you think?" I would ask of my sister. "When will she come
back? I think she'll come back at Christmas, not later; what has
she to do there?"

"As she doesn't write to you, it's evident she will come back very
soon.

"That's true," I assented, though I knew perfectly well that Masha
would not return to our town.

I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and
tried to get other people to deceive me. My sister was expecting
her doctor, and I--Masha; and both of us talked incessantly,
laughed, and did not notice that we were preventing Karpovna from
sleeping. She lay on the stove and kept muttering:

"The samovar hummed this morning, it did hum! Oh, it bodes no good,
my dears, it bodes no good!"

No one ever came to see us but the postman, who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes came in to see
us in the evening, and after looking at my sister without speaking
went away, and when he was in the kitchen said:

"Every class ought to remember its rules, and anyone, who is so
proud that he won't understand that, will find it a vale of tears."

He was very fond of the phrase "a vale of tears." One day--it was
in Christmas week, when I was walking by the bazaar--he called
me into the butcher's shop, and not shaking hands with me, announced
that he had to speak to me about something very important. His face
was red fr