e screamed. It was a fine healthy scream,
hungry and impatient.

"Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?" said Kitty
hurriedly, seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the
baby the breast. "But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how
tiresome you are! There, tie the cap afterwards, do!"

The baby's greedy scream was passing into sobs.

"But you can't manage so, ma'am," said Agafea Mihalovna, who was
almost always to be found in the nursery. "He must be put
straight. A-oo! a-oo!" she chanted over him, paying no attention
to the mother.

The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agafea Mihalovna
followed him with a face dissolving with tenderness.

"He knows me, he knows me. In God's faith, Katerina
Alexandrovna, ma'am, he knew me!" Agafea Mihalovna cried above
the baby's screams.

But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing,
like the baby's.

Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not
get hold of the breast right, and was furious.

At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain
sucking, things went right, and mother and child felt
simultaneously soothed, and both subsided into calm.

"But poor darling, he's all in perspiration!" said Kitty in a
whisper, touching the baby.

"What makes you think he knows you?" she added, with a sidelong
glance at the baby's eyes, that peered roguishly, as she fancied,
from under his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the
little red-palmed hand he was waving.

"Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me," said
Kitty, in response to Agafea Mihalovna's statement, and she
smiled.

She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her
heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but
that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a
great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother,
had learned and come to understand only through him. To Agafea
Mihalovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even,
Mitya was a living being, requiring only material care, but for
his mother he had long been a mortal being, with whom there had
been a whole series of spiritual relations already.

"When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then
when I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply
beams like a sunny day!" said Agafea Mihalovna.

"Well, well; then we shall see," whispered Kitty. "But now go