Excerpt: ...and with no smile: 'I don't know, Piotr Petrovitch, what you think of me now, but I dare say you remember what I used to be.... I was self-confident, light-hearted ... and not good; I wanted to live for my own pleasure. But I want to tell you this: when I was abandoned, and was like one lost, and was only waiting for God to take me, or to pluck up spirit to make an end of myself, -once more, just as in Voronezh, I met with Paramon Semyonitch-and he saved me once again.... Not a word that could wound me did I hear from him, not a word of reproach; he asked nothing of me-I was not worthy of that; but he loved me ... and I became his wife. What was I to do? I had failed of dying; and I could not live either after my own choice....What was I to do with myself? Even so-it was a mercy to be thankful for. That is all.' She ceased, turned away for an instant ... the same submissive smile came back to her lips. 'Whether life's easy for me, you needn't ask, ' was the meaning I fancied now in that smile. The conversation passed to ordinary subjects. Musa told me that Punin had left a cat that he had been very fond of, and that ever since his death she had gone up to the attic and stayed there, mewing incessantly, as though she were calling some one ... the neighbours were very much scared, and fancied that it was Punin's soul that had passed into the cat. 'Paramon Semyonitch is worried about something, ' I said at last. 'Oh, you noticed it?'-Musa sighed. 'He cannot help being worried. I need hardly tell you that Paramon Semyonitch has remained faithful to his principles.... The present condition of affairs can but strengthen them.' (Musa expressed herself quite differently now from in the old days in Moscow; there was a literary, bookish flavour in her phrases.) 'I don't know, though, whether I can rely upon you, and how you will receive ...' 'Why should you imagine you cannot rely upon me?' 'Well, you are in the government service-you are an