“There, there; I was joking, my darling!  I was joking!”

Or he would laugh at her strictness when, finding in the cupboard some stale bit of cheese or sausage as hard as a stone, she would say seriously: 

“They will eat that in the kitchen.”

He would observe that such a scrap was only fit for a mousetrap, and she would reply warmly that men knew nothing about housekeeping, and that it was just the same to the servants if you were to send down a hundredweight of savouries to the kitchen.  He would agree, and embrace her enthusiastically.  Everything that was just in what she said seemed to him extraordinary and amazing; and what did not fit in with his convictions seemed to him naive and touching.

Sometimes he was in a philosophical mood, and he would begin to discuss some abstract subject while she listened and looked at his face with curiosity.

“I am immensely happy with you, my joy,” he used to say, playing with her fingers or plaiting and unplaiting her hair.  “But I don’t look upon this happiness of mine as something that has come to me by chance, as though it had dropped from heaven.  This happiness is a perfectly natural, consistent, logical consequence.  I believe that man is the creator of his own happiness, and now I am enjoying just what I have myself created.  Yes, I speak without false modesty:  I have created this happiness myself and I have a right to it.  You know my past.  My unhappy childhood, without father or mother; my depressing youth, poverty—­all this was a struggle, all this was the path by which I made my way to happiness. . . .”

In October the school sustained a heavy loss:  Ippolit Ippolititch was taken ill with erysipelas on the head and died.  For two days before his death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in his delirium he said nothing that was not perfectly well known to every one.

“The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. . . .  Horses eat oats and hay. . . .”

There were no lessons at the high school on the day of his funeral.  His colleagues and pupils were the coffin-bearers, and the school choir sang all the way to the grave the anthem “Holy God.”  Three priests, two deacons, all his pupils and the staff of the boys’ high school, and the bishop’s choir in their best kaftans, took part in the procession.  And passers-by who met the solemn procession, crossed themselves and said: 

“God grant us all such a death.”

Returning home from the cemetery much moved, Nikitin got out his diary from the table and wrote: 

“We have just consigned to the tomb Ippolit Ippolititch Ryzhitsky.  Peace to your ashes, modest worker!  Masha, Varya, and all the women at the funeral, wept from genuine feeling, perhaps because they knew this uninteresting, humble man had never been loved by a woman.  I wanted to say a warm word at my colleague’s grave, but I was warned that this might displease the director, as he did not like our poor friend.  I believe that this is the first day since my marriage that my heart has been heavy.”