What I liked best was to look at my lady when she sat at the piano, alone in the room, and played. Music intoxicated me, and I could see nothing but the window, and beyond that, in the yellow light of the lamp, the finely formed figure of the woman, with her haughty profile and her white hands hovering like birds over the keys. I gazed at her, listened to the plaintive music, and dreamed. If I could find some treasure, I would give it all to her, so that she should be rich. If I had been Skobelev, I would have declared war on the Turks again. I would have taken money for ransoms, and built a house for her on the Otkossa, the best site in the whole town, and made her a present of it. If only she would leave this street, where every one talked offensively about her. The neighbors, the servants belonging to our yard, and my employers more than all spoke about "Queen Margot" as evilly and spitefully as they had talked about the tailor's wife, though more cautiously, with lowered voices, and looking about them as they spoke. They were afraid of her, probably because she was the widow of a very distinguished man. The writings on the walls of her rooms, too, were privileges bestowed on her husband's ancestors by the old Russian emperors Goudonov, Alexei, and Peter the Great. This was told me by the soldier Tuphyaev, a man of education, who was always reading the gospels. Or it may have been that people were afraid lest she should thrash them with her whip with the lilac-colored stone in the handle. It was said that she had once struck a person of position with it. But words uttered under the breath are no better than words uttered aloud. My lady lived in a cloud of enmity--an enmity which I could not understand and which tormented me. Now that I knew there was another life; that there were different people, feelings, and ideas, this house and all its tenants aroused in me a feeling of disgust that oppressed me more and more. It was entangled in the meshes of a dirty net of disgraceful tittle-tattle, there was not a single person in it of whom evil was not spoken. The regimental chaplain, though he was ill and miserable, had a reputation for being a drunkard and a rake; the officers and their wives were living, according to my employers, in a state of sin; the soldiers' conversation about women, which ran on the same lines, had become repulsive to me. But my employers disgusted me most of all. I knew too well the real value of their favorite amusement, namely, the merciless judgment of other people. Watching and commenting on the crimes of others was the only amusement in which they could indulge without paying for it. They amused themselves by putting those about them verbally on the rack, and, as it were, revenged themselves on others because they lived so piously, laboriously, and uninterestingly themselves.