ch got up and began walking to and fro.

"I ought to be abroad!" he said. And the artist told her that nothing
was easier than to go abroad. One need do nothing but paint a picture
and sell it.

"Of course!" Katya assented. "Why haven't you painted one in the
summer?"

"Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?" the artist said
ill-humouredly. "And where should I get models?"

Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who
was expecting her mother's return from minute to minute, jumped up
and ran away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked
to and fro, threading his way between the chairs and the piles of
untidy objects of all sorts. He heard the widow rattling the crockery
and loudly abusing the peasants who had asked her two roubles for
each cart. In his disgust Yegor Savvitch stopped before the cupboard
and stared for a long while, frowning at the decanter of vodka.

"Ah, blast you!" he heard the widow railing at Katya. "Damnation
take you!"

The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul
gradually disappeared, and he felt as though all his inside was
smiling within him. He began dreaming. . . . His fancy pictured how
he would become great. He could not imagine his future works but
he could see distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the
shops would sell his photographs, with what envy his friends would
look after him. He tried to picture himself in a magnificent
drawing-room surrounded by pretty and adoring women; but the picture
was misty, vague, as he had never in his life seen a drawing-room.
The pretty and adoring women were not a success either, for, except
Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl.
People who know nothing about life usually picture life from books,
but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either. He had tried to read Gogol,
but had fallen asleep on the second page.

"It won't burn, drat the thing!" the widow bawled down below, as
she set the samovar. "Katya, give me some charcoal!"

The dreamy artist felt a longing to share his hopes and dreams with
some one. He went downstairs into the kitchen, where the stout widow
and Katya were busy about a dirty stove in the midst of charcoal
fumes from the samovar. There he sat down on a bench close to a big
pot and began:

"It's a fine thing to be an artist! I can go just where I like, do
what I like. One has not to work in an office or in the fields.
I've no su