_Dikóy_: As if they were in league together, damn them! One after another, the whole day long they’ve been at me. _Kabanóva_: No doubt you’ll have to give it them, or they wouldn’t persist. _Dikóy_: I know that; but what would you have me do, since I’ve a temper like that? Why, I know that I must pay, still I can’t do it with a good will. You’re a friend of mine, and I’ve to pay you something, and you come and ask me for it--I’m bound to swear at you! Pay I will, if pay I must, but I must swear too. For you’ve only to hint at money to me, and I feel hot all over in a minute; red-hot all over, and that’s all about it. You may be sure at such times I’d swear at anyone for nothing at all. _Kabanóva_: You have no one over you, and so you think you can do as you like. _Dikóy_: No, you hold your tongue! Listen to me! I’ll tell you the sort of troubles that happen to me. I had fasted in Lent, and was all ready for Communion, and then the Evil One thrusts a wretched peasant under my nose. He had come for money, for wood he had supplied us. And, for my sins, he must needs show himself at a time like that! I fell into sin, of course; I pitched into him, pitched into him finely, I did, all but thrashed him. There you have it, my temper! Afterwards I asked his pardon, bowed down to his feet, upon my word I did. It’s the truth I’m telling you, I bowed down to a peasant’s feet. That’s what my temper brings me to: on the spot there, in the mud I bowed down to his feet; before everyone, I did.[23] Madame Kabanóva is well matched with Dikóy. She may be less primitive than her friend, but she is an infinitely more tyrannical oppressor. Her son is married and loves, more or less, his young wife; but he is kept under his mother’s rule just as if he were a boy. The mother hates, of course, the young wife, Katerína, and tyrannises over her as much as she can; and the husband has no energy to step in and defend her. He is only too happy when he can slip away from the house. He might have shown more love to his wife if they had been living apart from his mother; but being in this house, always under its tyrannical rule, he looks upon his wife as part of it all. Katerína, on the contrary, is a poetical being. She was brought up in a very good family, where she enjoyed full liberty, before she married the young Kabanóff, and now she feels very unhappy under the yoke of her terrible mother-in-law, having nobody but a weakling husband to occasionally say a word in her favour. There is also a little detail--she has a mortal fear of thunderstorms. This is a feature which is quite characteristic in the small towns on the upper Vólga: I have myself known well educated ladies who, having once been frightened by one of these sudden storms--they are of a terrific grandeur--retained a life-long fear of thunder.