In front of a particularly dilapidated hut stood a number of women with children in their arms, and among them he noticed a lean, pale-faced woman, easily holding a bloodless child in a short garment made of pieces of stuff.  This child was incessantly smiling.  Nekhludoff knew that it was the smile of suffering.  He asked who that woman was.

It transpired that the woman’s husband had been in prison for the past six months—­“feeding the insects”—­as they termed it, for cutting down two lindens.

Nekhludoff turned to the woman, Anisia.

“How do you fare?” he asked.  “What do you live on?”

“How do I live?  I sometimes get some food,” and she began to sob.

The grave face of the child, however, spread into a broad smile, and its thin legs began to wriggle.

Nekhludoff produced his pocketbook and gave the woman ten rubles.  He had scarcely made ten steps when he was overtaken by another woman with a child; then an old woman, and again another woman.  They all spoke of their poverty and implored his help.  Nekhludoff distributed the sixty rubles that were in his pocketbook and returned home, i. e., to the wing inhabited by the clerk.  The clerk, smiling, met Nekhludoff with the information that the peasants would gather in the evening, as he had ordered.  Nekhludoff thanked him and strolled about the garden, meditating on what he had seen.  “The people are dying in large numbers, and are used to it; they have acquired modes of living natural to a people who are becoming extinct—­the death of children, exhausting toil for women, insufficiency of food for all, especially for the aged—­all comes and is received naturally.  They were reduced to this condition gradually, so that they cannot see the horror of it, and bear it uncomplainingly.  Afterward, we, too, come to consider this condition natural; that it ought to be so.”

All this was so clear to him now that he could not cease wondering how it was that people could not see it; that he himself could not see that which is so patent.  It was perfectly clear that children and old people were dying for want of milk, and they had no milk because they had not land enough to feed the cattle and also raise bread and hay.  And he devised a scheme by which he was to give the land to the people, and they were to pay an annual rent which was to go to the community, to be used for common utilities and taxes.  This was not the single-tax, but it was the nearest approach to it under present conditions.  The important part consisted in that he renounced his right to own land.

When he returned to the house, the clerk, with a particularly happy smile on his face, offered him dinner, expressing his fear that it might spoil.

The table was covered with a gloomy cloth, an embroidered towel serving as a napkin, and on the table, in vieux-saxe, stood a soup-bowl with a broken handle, filled with potato soup and containing the same rooster that he had seen carried into the house on his arrival.  After the soup came the same rooster, fried with feathers, and cakes made of cheese-curds, bountifully covered with butter and sugar.  Although the taste of it all was poor, Nekhludoff kept on eating, being absorbed in the thoughts which relieved him of the sadness that oppressed him on his return from the village.