Robenok laughed, too, holding his sides, and for a long time they roasted me with their hot obscenity. It was unbearable! But while they were thus occupied, Natalia went away, and I, losing my temper at last, struck Robenok in the chest with my head, knocking him over, and ran away. For a long time after that I did not go near Millioni Street. But I saw Ardalon once again; I met him on the ferry-boat. "Where have you been hiding yourself?" he asked joyfully. When I told him that it was repulsive to me to remember how he had knocked Natalia about and obscenely insulted me, Ardalon laughed good-naturedly. "Did you take that seriously? We only rubbed it into you for a joke! As for her, why shouldn't she be knocked about, a street-walker? People beat their wives, so they are certainly not going to have more mercy on such as that! Still, it was only a joke, the whole thing. I understand, you know, that the fist is no good for teaching!" "What have you got to teach her? How are you better than she is?" He put his hands on my shoulders and, shaking me, said banteringly: "In our disgraceful state no one of us is better than another." Then he laughed and added boastfully: "I understand everything from within and without, brother, everything! I am not wood!" He was a little tipsy, at the jovial stage; he looked at me with the tender pity of a good master for an unintelligent pupil. Sometimes I met Pavl Odintzov. He was livelier than ever, dressed like a dandy, and talked to me condescendingly and always reproachfully. "You are throwing yourself away on that kind of work! They are nothing but peasants." Then he would sadly retail all the latest news from the workshop. "Jikharev is still taken up with that cow. Sitanov is plainly fretting; he has begun to drink to excess. The wolves have eaten Golovev; he was coming home from Sviatka; he was drunk, and the wolves devoured him." And bursting into a gay peal of laughter he comically added: "They ate him and they all became drunk themselves! They were very merry and walked about the forests on their hind legs, like performing dogs. Then they fell to fighting and in twenty-fours hours they were all dead!" I listened to him and laughed, too, but I felt that the workshop and all I had experienced in it was very far away from me now. This was rather a melancholy reflection. CHAPTER XIX There was hardly any work in the market-square during the winter, and instead I had innumerable trivial duties to perform in the house. They swallowed up the whole day, but the evenings were left free. Once more I read to the household novels which were unpalatable to me, from the "Neva" and the "Moscow Gazette"; but at night I occupied myself by reading good books and by attempts at writing poetry. One day when the women had gone out to vespers and my master was kept at home through indisposition, he asked me: