And so my relations with my employer were quiet and peaceful, but still the unclean and degrading element which I so dreaded on becoming a footman was conspicuous and made itself felt every day.  I did not get on with Polya.  She was a well-fed and pampered hussy who adored Orlov because he was a gentleman and despised me because I was a footman.  Probably, from the point of view of a real flunkey or cook, she was fascinating, with her red cheeks, her turned-up nose, her coquettish glances, and the plumpness, one might almost say fatness, of her person.  She powdered her face, coloured her lips and eyebrows, laced herself in, and wore a bustle, and a bangle made of coins.  She walked with little ripping steps; as she walked she swayed, or, as they say, wriggled her shoulders and back.  The rustle of her skirts, the creaking of her stays, the jingle her bangle and the vulgar smell of lip salve, toilet vinegar, and scent stolen from her master, aroused me whilst I was doing the rooms with her in the morning a sensation as though I were taking part with her in some abomination.

Either because I did not steal as she did, or because I displayed no desire to become her lover, which she probably looked upon as an insult, or perhaps because she felt that I was a man of a different order, she hated me from the first day.  My inexperience, my appearance —­so unlike a flunkey—­and my illness, seemed to her pitiful and excited her disgust.  I had a bad cough at that time, and sometimes at night I prevented her from sleeping, as our rooms were only divided by a wooden partition, and every morning she said to me: 

“Again you didn’t let me sleep.  You ought to be in hospital instead of in service.”

She so genuinely believed that I was hardly a human being, but something infinitely below her, that, like the Roman matrons who were not ashamed to bathe before their slaves, she sometimes went about in my presence in nothing but her chemise.

Once when I was in a happy, dreamy mood, I asked her at dinner (we had soup and roast meat sent in from a restaurant every day)

“Polya, do you believe in God?”

“Why, of course!”

“Then,” I went on, “you believe there will be a day of judgment, and that we shall have to answer to God for every evil action?”

She gave me no reply, but simply made a contemptuous grimace, and, looking that time at her cold eyes and over-fed expression, I realised that for her complete and finished personality no God, no conscience, no laws existed, and that if I had had to set fire to the house, to murder or to rob, I could not have hired a better accomplice.