why do you want to know whether I had any
children or not?"

Foma blushed, and, bending his head, began to speak to her in a heavy
voice, as though he was lifting every word from the ground and as though
each word weighed a few puds.

"You see--a woman who--has given birth to children--such a woman has
altogether different eyes."

"So? What kind are they then?"

"Shameless!" Foma blurted out.

Medinskaya broke into her silver laughter, and Foma, looking at her,
also began to laugh.

"Excuse me!" said he, at length. "Perhaps I've said something wrong,
improper."

"Oh, no, no! You cannot say anything improper. You are a pure, amiable
boy. And so, my eyes are not shameless?"

"Yours are like an angel's!" announced Foma with enthusiasm, looking
at her with beaming eyes. And she glanced at him, as she had never done
before; her look was that of a mother, a sad look of love mingled with
fear for the beloved.

"Go, dear one. I am tired; I need a rest," she said to him, as she rose
without looking at him. He went away submissively.

For some time after this incident her attitude toward him was stricter
and more sincere, as though she pitied him, but later their relations
assumed the old form of the cat-and-mouse play.

Foma's relation toward Medinskaya could not escape his godfather's
notice, and one day the old man asked him, with a malicious grimace:

"Foma! You had better feel your head more often so that you may not lose
it by accident."

"What do you mean?" asked Foma.

"I speak of Sonka. You are going to see her too often."

"What has that to do with you?" said Foma, rather rudely. "And why do
you call her Sonka?"

"It's nothing to me. I would lose nothing if you should be fleeced.
And as to calling her Sonka--everybody knows that is her name. So does
everybody know that she likes to rake up the fire with other people's
hands."

"She is clever!" announced Foma, firmly, frowning and hiding his hands
in his pockets. "She is intelligent."

"Clever, that's true! How cleverly she arranged that entertainment;
there was an income of two thousand four hundred roubles, the
expenses--one thousand nine hundred; the expenses really did not even
amount to a thousand roubles, for everybody does everything for her for
nothing. Intelligent! She will educate you, and especially will those
idlers that run around her."

"They're not idlers, they are clever people!" replied Foma, angrily,
contradicting himself now.