He stood for half a minute in silence, looking at me with his mouth open.

“Are you a vegetarian?” he asked.

“No, your Excellency, I eat meat.”

He sat down and drew some papers towards him.  I bowed and went out.

It was not worth while now to go to work before dinner.  I went home to sleep, but could not sleep from an unpleasant, sickly feeling, induced by the slaughter house and my conversation with the Governor, and when the evening came I went, gloomy and out of sorts, to Mariya Viktorovna.  I told her how I had been at the Governor’s, while she stared at me in perplexity as though she did not believe it, then suddenly began laughing gaily, loudly, irrepressibly, as only good-natured laughter-loving people can.

“If only one could tell that in Petersburg!” she brought out, almost falling over with laughter, and propping herself against the table.  “If one could tell that in Petersburg!”

IX

Now we used to see each other often, sometimes twice a day.  She used to come to the cemetery almost every day after dinner, and read the epitaphs on the crosses and tombstones while she waited for me.  Sometimes she would come into the church, and, standing by me, would look on while I worked.  The stillness, the naive work of the painters and gilders, Radish’s sage reflections, and the fact that I did not differ externally from the other workmen, and worked just as they did in my waistcoat with no socks on, and that I was addressed familiarly by them—­all this was new to her and touched her.  One day a workman, who was painting a dove on the ceiling, called out to me in her presence: 

“Misail, hand me up the white paint.”

I took him the white paint, and afterwards, when I let myself down by the frail scaffolding, she looked at me, touched to tears and smiling.

“What a dear you are!” she said.

I remembered from my childhood how a green parrot, belonging to one of the rich men of the town, had escaped from its cage, and how for quite a month afterwards the beautiful bird had haunted the town, flying from garden to garden, homeless and solitary.  Mariya Viktorovna reminded me of that bird.

“There is positively nowhere for me to go now but the cemetery,” she said to me with a laugh.  “The town has become disgustingly dull.  At the Azhogins’ they are still reciting, singing, lisping.  I have grown to detest them of late; your sister is an unsociable creature; Mademoiselle Blagovo hates me for some reason.  I don’t care for the theatre.  Tell me where am I to go?”

When I went to see her I smelt of paint and turpentine, and my hands were stained—­and she liked that; she wanted me to come to her in my ordinary working clothes; but in her drawing-room those clothes made me feel awkward.  I felt embarrassed, as though I were in uniform, so I always put on my new serge trousers when I went to her.  And she did not like that.