covered with dough. "I wish I had never set eyes on you."

Volodka gave her a blow on the ear and went off.

III

Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter visited the village on foot. They
were out for a walk. It was a Sunday, and the peasant women and girls
were walking up and down the street in their brightly-coloured dresses.
Rodion and Stepanida, sitting side by side at their door, bowed and
smiled to Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter as to acquaintances.
From the windows more than a dozen children stared at them; their faces
expressed amazement and curiosity, and they could be heard whispering:

"The Kutcherov lady has come! The Kutcherov lady!"

"Good-morning," said Elena Ivanovna, and she stopped; she paused, and
then asked: "Well, how are you getting on?"

"We get along all right, thank God," answered Rodion, speaking rapidly.
"To be sure we get along."

"The life we lead!" smiled Stepanida. "You can see our poverty
yourself, dear lady! The family is fourteen souls in all, and only two
bread-winners. We are supposed to be blacksmiths, but when they bring us
a horse to shoe we have no coal, nothing to buy it with. We are worried
to death, lady," she went on, and laughed. "Oh, oh, we are worried to
death."

Elena Ivanovna sat down at the entrance and, putting her arm round her
little girl, pondered something, and judging from the little girl's
expression, melancholy thoughts were straying through her mind, too; as
she brooded she played with the sumptuous lace on the parasol she had
taken out of her mother's hands.

"Poverty," said Rodion, "a great deal of anxiety--you see no end to it.
Here, God sends no rain... our life is not easy, there is no denying
it."

"You have a hard time in this life," said Elena Ivanovna, "but in the
other world you will be happy."

Rodion did not understand her, and simply coughed into his clenched hand
by way of reply. Stepanida said:

"Dear lady, the rich men will be all right in the next world, too. The
rich put up candles, pay for services; the rich give to beggars, but
what can the poor man do? He has no time to make the sign of the cross.
He is the beggar of beggars himself; how can he think of his soul? And
many sins come from poverty; from trouble we snarl at one another like
dogs, we haven't a good word to say to one another, and all sorts of
things happen, dear lady--God forbid! It seems we have no luck in this
world nor the next. All the luck has fallen t