eard on all sides. "House painter! Yellow
ochre!"

And none behaved so ungraciously to me as those who had only lately
been humble people themselves, and had earned their bread by hard
manual labour. In the streets full of shops I was once passing an
ironmonger's when water was thrown over me as though by accident,
and on one occasion someone darted out with a stick at me, while a
fishmonger, a grey-headed old man, barred my way and said, looking
at me angrily:

"I am not sorry for you, you fool! It's your father I am sorry for."

And my acquaintances were for some reason overcome with embarrassment
when they met me. Some of them looked upon me as a queer fish and
a comic fool; others were sorry for me; others did not know what
attitude to take up to me, and it was difficult to make them out.
One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side street near Great Dvoryansky
Street. I was going to work, and was carrying two long brushes and
a pail of paint. Recognizing me Anyuta flushed crimson.

"Please do not bow to me in the street," she said nervously, harshly,
and in a shaking voice, without offering me her hand, and tears
suddenly gleamed in her eyes. "If to your mind all this is necessary,
so be it . . . so be it, but I beg you not to meet me!"

I no longer lived in Great Dvoryansky Street, but in the suburb
with my old nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman,
who always foreboded some harm, was afraid of all dreams, and even
in the bees and wasps that flew into her room saw omens of evil,
and the fact that I had become a workman, to her thinking, boded
nothing good.

"Your life is ruined," she would say, mournfully shaking her head,
"ruined."

Her adopted son Prokofy, a huge, uncouth, red-headed fellow of
thirty, with bristling moustaches, a butcher by trade, lived in the
little house with her. When he met me in the passage he would make
way for me in respectful silence, and if he was drunk he would
salute me with all five fingers at once. He used to have supper in
the evening, and through the partition wall of boards I could hear
him clear his throat and sigh as he drank off glass after glass.

"Mamma," he would call in an undertone.

"Well," Karpovna, who was passionately devoted to her adopted son,
would respond: "What is it, sonny?"

"I can show you a testimony of my affection, mamma. All this earthly
life I will cherish you in your declining years in this vale of
tears, and when you die I will bur