the trees were all bending on one side. He could see the yellow
leaves whirling round in the air and on the earth. Farewell, summer!
This melancholy of nature is beautiful and poetical in its own way,
when it is looked at with the eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch
was in no humour to see beauty. He was devoured by ennui and his
only consolation was the thought that by to-morrow he would not be
there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the floor, were all heaped
up with cushions, crumpled bed-clothes, boxes. The floor had not
been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down from the windows.
Next day he was moving, to town.

His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to
hire horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the
absence of her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had
for a long time been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the
painter was going away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She
kept talking, talking, and yet she felt that she had not said a
tenth of what she wanted to say. With her eyes full of tears, she
gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness. And
Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous extent, so that he looked
like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his shoulder-blades, his
beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from his ears; his
eyes were lost under his thick overhanging brows. It was all so
thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in his
hair, it would never have found its way out of this enchanted
thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was tired.
When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his
overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:

"I cannot marry."

"Why not?" Katya asked softly.

"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art,
marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free."

"But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?"

"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous
authors and painters have never married."

"And you, too, will be famous--I understand that perfectly. But
put yourself in my place. I am afraid of my mother. She is stern
and irritable. When she knows that you won't marry me, and that
it's all nothing . . . she'll begin to give it to me. Oh, how
wretched I am! And you haven't paid for your rooms, either! . . . ."

"Damn her! I'll pay."

Yegor Savvit