from her. Again, as she sits bending over her work,
one will descry through a rent in her bodice a small, firm bosom which
might almost have been that of a virgin, were it not for the fact that
a projecting teat proclaims that she is a woman preparing to suckle an
infant. In short, as she sits among her companions she looks like a
fragment of copper flung into the midst of some rusty old scrap-iron.

Most of the people in whose society I wander neither rise to great
heights nor sink to great depths, but are as colourless as dust, and
wearisomely insignificant. Hence is it that whenever I chance upon a
person whose soul I can probe and explore for thoughts unfamiliar to me
and words not hitherto heard I congratulate myself, seeing that though
it is my desire to see life grow more fair and exalted, and I yearn to
bring about that end, there constantly reveals itself to me merely a
vista of sharp angles and dark spaces and poor crushed, defrauded
people. Yes, never do I seek to project a spark of my own fire into the
darkness of my neighbour's soul but I see that spark disappear, become
lost, in a chaos of dumb vacuity.

Hence the woman of whom I have just spoken particularly excites my
fancy, and leads me to attempt divinations of her past, until I find
myself evolving a story which is not only of vast complexity, but has
got painted into it merely the colours of my own hopes and aspirations.
It is a story necessarily illusory, necessarily bound to make life seem
even worse than before. Yet it is a grievous thing NEVER to distort
actuality, NEVER to envelop actuality in the wrappings of one's
imagination....

Closing his eyes, and picking his words with difficulty, a tall, fair
peasant drawls in thick, gluelike tones:

"'Very well,' I said: and off we set. On the way I said again: 'Gubin,
though you may not like to be told so, you are no better than a thief.'"

The o's uttered by this peasant are uniformly round and firm--they roll
forward as a cartwheel trundles along a hot, dusty country road.

The youth with the high cheek-bones fixes the whites of his porcine
eyes (eyes the pupils of which are as indeterminate as the eyes of a
blind man) upon the woman in the green scarf. Then, having, like a
calf, plucked and chewed some stalks of the withered grass, he rolls up
the sleeves of his shirt, bends one fist into the crook of the elbow,
and says to Konev with a glance at the well-developed muscle:

"Should you care