“And here’s another instance,” Zhmuhin went on.  “We had the Siberian plague here, you know—­the cattle die off like flies, I can tell you—­and the veterinary surgeons came here, and strict orders were given that the dead cattle were to be buried at a distance deep in the earth, that lime was to be thrown over them, and so on, you know, on scientific principles.  My horse died too.  I buried it with every precaution, and threw over three hundredweight of lime over it.  And what do you think?  My fine fellows—­my precious sons, I mean—­dug it up, skinned it, and sold the hide for three roubles; there’s an instance for you.  So people have grown no better, and however you feed a wolf he will always look towards the forest; there it is.  It gives one something to think about, eh?  How do you look at it?”

On one side a flash of lightning gleamed through a chink in the window-blinds.  There was the stifling feeling of a storm coming, the gnats were biting, and Zhmuhin, as he lay in his bedroom meditating, sighed and groaned and said to himself:  “Yes, to be sure ——­” and there was no possibility of getting to sleep.  Somewhere far, far away there was a growl of thunder.

“Are you asleep?”

“No,” answered the visitor.

Zhmuhin got up, and thudding with his heels walked through the parlour and the entry to the kitchen to get a drink of water.

“The worst thing in the world, you know, is stupidity,” he said a little later, coming back with a dipper.  “My Lyubov Osipovna is on her knees saying her prayers.  She prays every night, you know, and bows down to the ground, first that her children may be sent to school; she is afraid her boys will go into the army as simple Cossacks, and that they will be whacked across their backs with sabres.  But for teaching one must have money, and where is one to get it?  You may break the floor beating your head against it, but if you haven’t got it you haven’t.  And the other reason she prays is because, you know, every woman imagines there is no one in the world as unhappy as she is.  I am a plain-spoken man, and I don’t want to conceal anything from you.  She comes of a poor family, a village priest’s daughter.  I married her when she was seventeen, and they accepted my offer chiefly because they hadn’t enough to eat; it was nothing but poverty and misery, while I have anyway land, you see—­a farm—­and after all I am an officer; it was a step up for her to marry me, you know.  On the very first day when she was married she cried, and she has been crying ever since, all these twenty years; she has got a watery eye.  And she’s always sitting and thinking, and what do you suppose she is thinking about?  What can a woman think about?  Why, nothing.  I must own I don’t consider a woman a human being.”

The visitor got up abruptly and sat on the bed.

“Excuse me, I feel stifled,” he said; “I will go outside.”