cry in a trembling voice: "Think what you are
doing, brother! Repent, brother!" Aglaia stormed and Yakov, too,
flew into a passion and shouted: "Go out of my house!" while Matvey
answered him: "The house belongs to both of us."

Yakov would begin singing and reading again, but he could not regain
his calm, and unconsciously fell to dreaming over his book. Though
he regarded his cousin's words as nonsense, yet for some reason it
had of late haunted his memory that it is hard for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of heaven, that the year before last he had made
a very good bargain over buying a stolen horse, that one day when
his wife was alive a drunkard had died of vodka in his tavern. . . .

He slept badly at nights now and woke easily, and he could hear
that Matvey, too, was awake, and continually sighing and pining for
his tile factory. And while Yakov turned over from one side to
another at night he thought of the stolen horse and the drunken
man, and what was said in the gospels about the camel.

It looked as though his dreaminess were coming over him again. And
as ill-luck would have it, although it was the end of March, every
day it kept snowing, and the forest roared as though it were winter,
and there was no believing that spring would ever come. The weather
disposed one to depression, and to quarrelling and to hatred and
in the night, when the wind droned over the ceiling, it seemed as
though someone were living overhead in the empty storey; little by
little the broodings settled like a burden on his mind, his head
burned and he could not sleep.

IV

On the morning of the Monday before Good Friday, Matvey heard from
his room Dashutka say to Aglaia:

"Uncle Matvey said, the other day, that there is no need to fast."

Matvey remembered the whole conversation he had had the evening
before with Dashutka, and he felt hurt all at once.

"Girl, don't do wrong!" he said in a moaning voice, like a sick
man. "You can't do without fasting; our Lord Himself fasted forty
days. I only explained that fasting does a bad man no good."

"You should just listen to the factory hands; they can teach you
goodness," Aglaia said sarcastically as she washed the floor (she
usually washed the floors on working days and was always angry with
everyone when she did it). "We know how they keep the fasts in the
factory. You had better ask that uncle of yours--ask him about
his 'Darling,' how he used to guzzle milk on fast days with