g. Sometimes he brought a book and read to himself.
Maryanka crouched like a wild goat with her feet drawn up under her,
sometimes on the top of the oven, sometimes in a dark corner. She did
not take part in the conversations, but Olenin saw her eyes and face
and heard her moving or cracking sunflower seeds, and he felt that she
listened with her whole being when he spoke, and was aware of his
presence while he silently read to himself. Sometimes he thought her
eyes were fixed on him, and meeting their radiance he involuntarily
became silent and gazed at her. Then she would instantly hide her face
and he would pretend to be deep in conversation with the old woman,
while he listened all the time to her breathing and to her every
movement and waited for her to look at him again. In the presence of
others she was generally bright and friendly with him, but when they
were alone together she was shy and rough. Sometimes he came in before
Maryanka had returned home. Suddenly he would hear her firm footsteps
and catch a glimmer of her blue cotton smock at the open door. Then she
would step into the middle of the hut, catch sight of him, and her eyes
would give a scarcely perceptible kindly smile, and he would feel happy
and frightened.

He neither sought for nor wished for anything from her, but every day
her presence became more and more necessary to him.

Olenin had entered into the life of the Cossack village so fully that
his past seemed quite foreign to him. As to the future, especially a
future outside the world in which he was now living, it did not
interest him at all. When he received letters from home, from relatives
and friends, he was offended by the evident distress with which they
regarded him as a lost man, while he in his village considered those as
lost who did not live as he was living. He felt sure he would never
repent of having broken away from his former surroundings and of having
settled down in this village to such a solitary and original life. When
out on expeditions, and when quartered at one of the forts, he felt
happy too; but it was here, from under Daddy Eroshka's wing, from the
forest and from his hut at the end of the village, and especially when
he thought of Maryanka and Lukashka, that he seemed to see the
falseness of his former life. That falseness used to rouse his
indignation even before, but now it seemed inexpressibly vile and
ridiculous. Here he felt freer and freer every day and more