"What would she say if she knew?" thought he. "Perhaps she would shun me!" A kind of madness overcame him. He felt the wish to risk his happiness in order to convince himself of its durability, to put his petted wife to the test. "How you butterflies, floating over flowers in the sunshine, must be horrified at the miserable worms who creep over the earth!" he began bitterly.
"What are you thinking of?" asked she, astonished.
"Nothing especial, only that I was originally just such a worm, creeping over the earth."
"Ah! that is long past!" she interrupted him hastily. She wished to keep him from long dwelling on an unpleasant thought, but he suspected that his insinuation of his humble antecedents vexed her, and that she felt the need of forgetting his derivation. He looked at her from head to foot, with an angry, wondering glance. Her richly embroidered white dress, the large diamonds in her ears,--how the diamonds sparkled in the dull evening light!
Then he began to speak of his childhood, dryly, with a smile on his lips as if it was a question of something quite indifferent and amusing.
In a large tenement at Moscow, overcrowded with all kinds of human vermin, had he grown up; in the half of a room that was divided by a sail, behind which another poor family hungered. His father he did not remember. His mother sang to the guitar in wine rooms. When he was five years old she had bought him a fiddle for four rubles, and then some one, a dissolute musician, who often came to them, had taught him to scrape on it a little. From that time he accompanied his mother when she sang in the wine rooms,--or even on the streets, as it happened.
She had been pretty; the drawing which hung in the laurel wreath, and which an artist in their horrible dwelling-place had made of her, was like her. Only she had quite unusually beautiful teeth which one could not see in the picture. He remembered these teeth very well, because she laughed so much, especially if there was little to eat and she made him take it all, and declared she had spoiled her appetite at a friend's house with fresh _pirogj_. Once the thought had occurred to him that she only said so because there was not enough for two, and then he could not eat anything more. If there was nothing at all to eat, either for him or for her, she told him a story.