walks cautiously on them—they're sore from not being used to it; but she looks as joyful, as radiant, as though she had found a treasure, as though the sun were shining on her. Yes, Marianna's first-rate! And when I try to talk to her of my feelings, to begin with, I feel somehow ashamed, as though I were laying hands on what's not mine; and then that look . . . oh, that awful, devoted, unresisting look. . . . "Take me," it seems to say . . . "but remember! And what need of all this? Isn't there something better, higher upon earth?" That is, in other words, "Put on your stinking overcoat, and go out to the people." . . . And so, you see, I go out to the people.. . .
'Oh, how I curse at such times my nervousness, delicacy, sensitiveness, squeamishness, all I have inherited from my aristocratic father! What right had he to shove me into life, supplying me with organs utterly unfit for the surroundings in which I must move? To hatch a chicken and shove it into the water! An artist in the mud! a democrat, a lover of the people, whom the mere smell of that loathsome vodka, "the green wine," turns ill and nearly sick?
'See what I've worked myself up to—abusing my father! And, indeed, I became
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