“Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?” asked Masha.

“Love among us in the village!” answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh.  “Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my second marriage.  I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho, but afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married.  You see my father did not want to divide the land among us.  There were five of us brothers.  I took my leave and went to another village to live with my wife’s family, but my first wife died when she was young.”

“What did she die of?”

“Of foolishness.  She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and so she pined away.  She was always drinking some sort of herbs to make her better looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside.  And my second wife is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her.  She’s a village woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more.  I was taken in when they plighted me to her.  I thought she was young and fair-skinned, and that they lived in a clean way.  Her mother was just like a Flagellant and she drank coffee, and the chief thing, to be sure, they were clean in their ways.  So I married her, and next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my mother-in-law give me a spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her wipe it out with her finger.  So much for you, thought I; nice sort of cleanliness yours is.  I lived a year with them and then I went away.  I might have married a girl from the town,” he went on after a pause.  “They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband.  What do I want with a helpmate?  I help myself; I’d rather she talked to me, and not clack, clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly.  What is life without good conversation?”

Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his dreary, monotonous “oo-loo-loo-loo.”  This meant that he had seen me.

Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure in her conversations with Stepan.  Stepan abused the peasants with such sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him.  Every time she came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who looked after the garden, shouted at her: 

“Wench Palashka!  Hulla, wench Palashka!” and he would bark like a dog:  “Ga!  Ga!”

And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that idiot’s barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably he attracted her in the same way as Stepan’s abuse.  At home some piece of news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese from the village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that Larion had stolen the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a laugh: 

“What do you expect of these people?”