to the South of France there are bitterly cold days, especially when you have to sit still for six hours at a stretch.  The walls of these villas on the Riviera are so flimsy.  Peter Ivanovitch did not seem to be aware of anything.  It is true that I kept down my shivers from fear of putting him out.  I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt absolutely locked.  In the moments when Peter Ivanovitch interrupted his dictation, and sometimes these intervals were very long—­often twenty minutes, no less, while he walked to and fro behind my back muttering to himself—­I felt I was dying by inches, I assure you.  Perhaps if I had let my teeth rattle Peter Ivanovitch might have noticed my distress, but I don’t think it would have had any practical effect.  She’s very miserly in such matters.”

The dame de compagnie glanced up the staircase.  The big cat had finished the milk and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously against her skirt.  She dived to snatch it up from the floor.

“Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know,” she continued, holding the cat in her folded arms.  “With us it is misers who can spare money for worthy objects—­not the so-called generous natures.  But pray don’t think I am a sybarite.  My father was a clerk in the Ministry of Finances with no position at all.  You may guess by this that our home was far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually suffer from cold.  I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began to think by myself.  It is not very easy, such thinking.  One has got to be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth.  I am indebted for my salvation to an old apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway of the house we lived in.  She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most friendly voice imaginable.  One day, casually, we began to talk about a child, a ragged little girl we had seen begging from men in the streets at dusk; and from one thing to another my eyes began to open gradually to the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in this world, only in order that governments might exist.  After I once understood the crime of the upper classes, I could not go on living with my parents.  Not a single charitable word was to be heard in our home from year’s end to year’s end; there was nothing but the talk of vile office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries, and of courting the favour of the chiefs.  The mere idea of marrying one day such another man as my father made me shudder.  I don’t mean that there was anyone wanting to marry me.  There was not the slightest prospect of anything of the kind.  But was it not sin enough to live on a Government salary while half Russia was dying of hunger?  The Ministry of Finances!  What a grotesque horror it is!  What does the starving, ignorant people want with a Ministry of Finances?  I kissed my old folks on both cheeks, and went away from them to live in cellars, with the proletariat.  I tried to make myself useful to