However, on the present occasion the punishment never came, nor was the matter ever referred to again.  Yet, I could not forget all that I had gone through—­the shame, the fear, and the hatred of those two days.  From that time forth, St. Jerome appeared to give me up in despair, and took no further trouble with me, yet I could not bring myself to treat him with indifference.  Every time that our eyes met I felt that my look expressed only too plainly my dislike, and, though I tried hard to assume a careless air, he seemed to divine my hypocrisy, until I was forced to blush and turn away.

In short, it was a terrible trial to me to have anything to do with him.

XVIII.  THE MAIDSERVANTS’ ROOM

I began to feel more and more lonely, until my chief solace lay in solitary reflection and observation.  Of the favourite subject of my reflections I shall speak in the next chapter.  The scene where I indulged in them was, for preference, the maidservants’ room, where a plot suitable for a novel was in progress—­a plot which touched and engrossed me to the highest degree.  The heroine of the romance was, of course, Masha.  She was in love with Basil, who had known her before she had become a servant in our house, and who had promised to marry her some day.  Unfortunately, fate, which had separated them five years ago, and afterwards reunited them in Grandmamma’s abode, next proceeded to interpose an obstacle between them in the shape of Masha’s uncle, our man Nicola, who would not hear of his niece marrying that “uneducated and unbearable fellow,” as he called Basil.  One effect of the obstacle had been to make the otherwise slightly cool and indifferent Basil fall as passionately in love with Masha as it is possible for a man to be who is only a servant and a tailor, wears a red shirt, and has his hair pomaded.  Although his methods of expressing his affection were odd (for instance, whenever he met Masha he always endeavoured to inflict upon her some bodily pain, either by pinching her, giving her a slap with his open hand, or squeezing her so hard that she could scarcely breathe), that affection was sincere enough, and he proved it by the fact that, from the moment when Nicola refused him his niece’s hand, his grief led him to drinking, and to frequenting taverns, until he proved so unruly that more than once he had to be sent to undergo a humiliating chastisement at the police-station.

Nevertheless, these faults of his and their consequences only served to elevate him in Masha’s eyes, and to increase her love for him.  Whenever he was in the hands of the police, she would sit crying the whole day, and complain to Gasha of her hard fate (Gasha played an active part in the affairs of these unfortunate lovers).  Then, regardless of her uncle’s anger and blows, she would stealthily make her way to the police-station, there to visit and console her swain.