"Are you from the town?" she asked timidly, not looking at her
visitor.

"Yes, I live in the town."

"Perhaps you are something in the learned way, sir; be so kind as
to advise us. We ought to send in a petition."

"To whom?" asked the visitor.

"We have two sons, kind gentleman, and they ought to have been sent
to school long ago, but we never see anyone and have no one to
advise us. And I know nothing. For if they are not taught they will
have to serve in the army as common Cossacks. It's not right, sir!
They can't read and write, they are worse than peasants, and Ivan
Abramitch himself can't stand them and won't let them indoors. But
they are not to blame. The younger one, at any rate, ought to be
sent to school, it is such a pity!" she said slowly, and there was
a quiver in her voice; and it seemed incredible that a woman so
small and so youthful could have grown-up children. "Oh, it's such
a pity!"

"You don't know anything about it, mother, and it is not your
affair," said Zhmuhin, appearing in the doorway. "Don't pester our
guest with your wild talk. Go away, mother!"

Lyubov Osipovna went out, and in the entry repeated once more in a
thin little voice: "Oh, it's such a pity!"

A bed was made up for the visitor on the sofa in the parlour, and
that it might not be dark for him they lighted the lamp before the
ikon. Zhmuhin went to bed in his own room. And as he lay there he
thought of his soul, of his age, of his recent stroke which had so
frightened him and made him think of death. He was fond of
philosophizing when he was in quietness by himself, and then he
fancied that he was a very earnest, deep thinker, and that nothing
in this world interested him but serious questions. And now he kept
thinking and he longed to pitch upon some one significant thought
unlike others, which would be a guide to him in life, and he wanted
to think out principles of some sort for himself so as to make his
life as deep and earnest as he imagined that he felt himself to be.
It would be a good thing for an old man like him to abstain altogether
from meat, from superfluities of all sorts. The time when men give
up killing each other and animals would come sooner or later, it
could not but be so, and he imagined that time to himself and clearly
pictured himself living in peace with all the animals, and suddenly
he thought again of the pigs, and everything was in a tangle in his
brain.

"It's a queer business, Lord have