The faceless images looked from the dark walls; the dark night pressed against the window-panes. The lamps burned dimly in the stuffy workshop; if one listened, one could hear above the heavy trampling and the din of voices the quick dropping of water from the copper wash-basin into the tub. How unlike this was to the life I read of in books! It was painfully unlike it. At length they all grew weary of this, and Kapendiukhin put the harmonica into Salautin's hands, and cried: "Go on! Fire away!" He danced like Vanka Tzigan, just as if he was swimming in the air. Then Pavl Odintzov and Sorokhin danced passionately and lightly after him. The consumptive Davidov also moved his feet about the floor, and coughed from the dust, smoke, and the strong odor of vodka and smoked sausage, which always smells like tanned hide. They danced, and sang, and shouted, but each remembered that they were making merry, and gave each other a sort of test--a test of agility and endurance. Tipsy Sitanov asked first one and then another: "Do you think any one could really love a woman like that?" He looked as if he were on the verge of tears. Larionovich, lifting the sharp bones of his shoulders, answered: "A woman is a woman--what more do you want?" The two of whom they spoke disappeared unnoticed. Jikharev reappeared in the workshop in two or three days, went to the bath, and worked for two weeks in his corner, without speaking, pompous and estranged from every one. "Have they gone?" asked Sitanov of himself, looking round the workshop with sad blue-gray eyes. His face was not handsome, for there was something elderly about it, but his eyes were clear and good. Sitanov was friendly to me--a fact which I owed to my thick note-book in which I had written poetry. He did not believe in God, but it was hard to understand who in the workshop, beside Larionovich, loved God and believed in Him. They all spoke of Him with levity, derisively, just as they liked to speak of their mistresses. Yet when they dined, or supped, they all crossed themselves, and when they went to bed, they said their prayers, and went to church on Sundays and feast days. Sitanov did none of these things, and he was counted as an unbeliever. "There is no God," he said. "Where did we all come from, then?" "I don't know." When I asked him how God could possibly not be, he explained: "Don't you see that God is height!" He raised his long arm above his head, then lowered it to an arshin from the floor, and said: "And man is depth! Is that true? And it is written: Man was created in the image and likeness of God,--as you know! And what is Golovev like?" This defeated me. The dirty and drunken old man, in spite of his years, was given to an unmentionable sin. I remembered the Viatski soldier, Ermokhin, and grandmother's sister. Where was God's likeness in them?