One day I saw her going down the stairs with a jug of warm milk in her hands, but suddenly her legs gave way under her. She sat down, and descended the stairs, sadly bumping from step to step, and never letting the jug out of her hand. The milk splashed over her dress, and she, with her hands outstretched, cried angrily to the jug: "What is the matter with you, satyr? Where are you going?" Not stout, but soft to flabbiness, she looked like an old cat which had grown beyond catching mice, and, languid from overfeeding, could do no more than purr, dwelling sweetly on the memories of past triumphs and pleasures. "Here," said Sitanov, frowning thoughtfully, "was a large business, a fine workshop, and clever men labored at this trade; but now that is all done with, all gone to ruin, all directed by the paws of Kuzikin! It is a case of working and working, and all for strangers! When one thinks of this, a sort of spring seems to break in one's head. One wants to do nothing,--a fig for any kind of work!--just to lie on the roof, lie there for the whole summer and look up into the sky." Pavl Odintzov also appropriated these thoughts of Sitanov, and smoking a cigarette which had been given him by his elders, philosophized about God, drunkenness, and women. He enlarged on the fact that all work disappears; certain people do it and others destroy it, neither valuing it nor understanding it. At such times his sharp, pleasant face frowned, aged. He would sit on his bed on the floor, embracing his knees, and look long at the blue square of the window, at the roof of the shed which lay under a fall of snow, and at the stars in the winter sky. The workmen snored, or talked in their sleep; one of them raved, choking with words; in the loft, Davidov coughed away what was left of his life. In the corner, body to body, wrapped in an iron-bound sleep of intoxication, lay those "slaves of God"--Kapendiukhin, Sorokhin, Pershin; from the walls icons without faces, hands, or feet looked forth. There was a close smell of bad eggs, and dirt, which had turned sour in the crevices of the floor. "How I pity them all!" whispered Pavl. "Lord!" This pity for myself and others disturbed me more and more. To us both, as I have said before, all the workmen seemed to be good people, but their lives were bad, unworthy of them, unbearably dull. At the time of the winter snowstorms, when everything on the earth--the houses, the trees--was shaken, howled, and wept, and in Lent, when the melancholy bells rang out, the dullness of it all flowed over the workshop like a wave, as oppressive as lead, weighing people down, killing all that was alive in them, driving them to the tavern, to women, who served the same purpose as vodka in helping them to forget.