Sometimes from the very first chapters I began to wonder who would win or who would be vanquished, and as soon as the course of the story became clear, I would set myself to unravel the skein of events by the aid of my own fancy. When I was not reading I was thinking of the books I had on hand, as one would think about the problems in an arithmetic. I became more skilful every day in guessing which of the characters would enter into the paradise of happiness and which would be utterly confounded. But through all this I saw the glimmer of living and, to me, significant truths, the outlines of another life, other standards. It was clear to me that in Paris the cabmen, working men, soldiers, and all "black people"[1] were not at all as they were in Nijni, Kazan, or Perm. They dared to speak to gentlefolk, and behaved toward them more simply and independently than our people. Here, for example, was a soldier quite unlike any I had known, unlike Sidorov, unlike the Viatskian on the boat, and still more unlike Ermokhin. He was more human than any of these. He had something of Smouri about him, but he was not so savage and coarse. Here was a shopkeeper, but he was much better than any of the shopkeepers I had known. And the priests in books were not like the priests I knew. They had more feeling, and seemed to enter more into the lives of their flocks. And in general it seemed to me that life abroad, as it appeared in books, was more interesting, easier, better than the life I knew. Abroad, people did not behave so brutally. They never jeered at other human creatures as cruelly as the Viatskian soldier had been jeered at, nor prayed to God as importunately as the old mistress did. What I noticed particularly was that, when villains, misers, and low characters were depicted in books, they did not show that incomprehensible cruelty, that inclination to jeer at humanity, with which I was acquainted, and which was often brought to my notice. There was method in the cruelty of these bookish villains. One could almost always understand why they were cruel; but the cruelty which I witnessed was aimless, senseless, an amusement from which no one expected to gain any advantage. [Footnote 1: The common people.] With every book that I read this dissimilarity between Russian life and that of other countries stood out more clearly, causing a perplexed feeling of irritation within me, strengthening my suspicion of the veracity of the old, well-read pages with their dirty "dogs'-ears."