And again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the watchman, of the School Council; and when the wind brought the sound of the retreating carriage these thoughts were mingled with others.  She longed to think of beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness which would never be....

His wife?  It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the stove, the watchman disappeared; the children came in as soon as it was light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise:  it was all so inconvenient, so comfortless.  Her abode consisted of one little room and the kitchen close by.  Her head ached every day after her work, and after dinner she had heart-burn.  She had to collect money from the school-children for wood and for the watchman, and to give it to the school guardian, and then to entreat him—­that overfed, insolent peasant—­for God’s sake to send her wood.  And at night she dreamed of examinations, peasants, snowdrifts.  And this life was making her grow old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead.  She was always afraid, and she would get up from her seat and not venture to sit down in the presence of a member of the Zemstvo or the school guardian.  And she used formal, deferential expressions when she spoke of any one of them.  And no one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances.  How awful it would have been in her position if she had fallen in love!

“Hold on, Vassilyevna!”

Again a sharp ascent uphill....

She had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any vocation for it; and she had never thought of a vocation, of serving the cause of enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the examinations.  And what time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving the cause of enlightenment?  Teachers, badly paid doctors, and their assistants, with their terribly hard work, have not even the comfort of thinking that they are serving an idea or the people, as their heads are always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire, of bad roads, of illnesses.  It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life, and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up the work.

Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow, then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants would not let them pass, in another it was the priest’s land and they could not cross it, in another Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch round it.  They kept having to turn back.