same talk, the same thoughts, and always about the same things! And
they are all satisfied and confident that it should be so, and will
go on living like that till they die. But I can't. It bores me. I want
something that would upset it all and turn it upside down. Suppose
it happened to us as to those people--at Saratov was it?--who kept on
driving and froze to death.... What would our people do? How would
they behave? Basely, for certain. Each for himself. And I too should act
badly. But I at any rate have beauty. They all know it. And how about
that monk? Is it possible that he has become indifferent to it? No! That
is the one thing they all care for--like that cadet last autumn. What a
fool he was!'

'Ivan Nikolaevich!' she said aloud.

'What are your commands?'

'How old is he?'

'Who?'

'Kasatsky.'

'Over forty, I should think.'

'And does he receive all visitors?'

'Yes, everybody, but not always.'

'Cover up my feet. Not like that--how clumsy you are! No! More,
more--like that! But you need not squeeze them!'

So they came to the forest where the cell was.

Makovkina got out of the sledge, and told them to drive on. They tried
to dissuade her, but she grew irritable and ordered them to go on.

When the sledges had gone she went up the path in her white dogskin
coat. The lawyer got out and stopped to watch her.

It was Father Sergius's sixth year as a recluse, and he was now
forty-nine. His life in solitude was hard--not on account of the fasts
and the prayers (they were no hardship to him) but on account of an
inner conflict he had not at all anticipated. The sources of that
conflict were two: doubts, and the lust of the flesh. And these two
enemies always appeared together. It seemed to him that they were two
foes, but in reality they were one and the same. As soon as doubt was
gone so was the lustful desire. But thinking them to be two different
fiends he fought them separately.

'O my God, my God!' thought he. 'Why dost thou not grant me faith? There
is lust, of course: even the saints had to fight that--Saint Anthony and
others. But they had faith, while I have moments, hours, and days, when
it is absent. Why does the whole world, with all its delights, exist
if it is sinful and must be renounced? Why hast Thou created this
temptation? Temptation? Is it not rather a temptation that I wish to
abandon all the joys of earth and prepare something for myself there
where perhaps there is nothin