"You're lying! Why do you lie?" He became enraged, showed his teeth and threatened me with his fist. "You're a liar and a rascal," he shouted. I was only astonished. What is he saying there about naked women? A man works from three o'clock in the morning till ten at night and then lies down to sleep with bones aching like a beggar's in winter--and he talks of women. Such were my thoughts. Once I went into the ante-room for yeast. It was a dark room in the cellar, opposite the bakery. I found the door unlocked and a lantern burning. I opened the door and saw Misha crawling on the ground on his stomach, and crying out: "Send them away, I implore Thee, Lord! Send them away! Deliver me!" Of course, I immediately went out, but I could not guess what it was about. He always spoke hatefully and insultingly about women, called all womankind vulgar and in real peasant fashion spat at them, clutching the air with his fingers as if in his mind's eye he were tearing and pulling a woman's body apart. I could not bear to hear him talk. I remembered my own wife and our happy tears the first night of our marriage, and the quiet, inner wonder with each other, and our great joy. Is it not Thy sweet gift to man, O Lord? I remembered Tatiana's good heart and her simplicity, and I was hurt to tears for womankind. I thought to myself: "When the Abbot will call me for an interview, I shall tell him everything." But he did not call me. The days passed one after another, like blind people in a wood along a narrow path, each one stumbling upon the other, and still the Abbot did not call me. Darkness was within me. At that time, in my twenty-second year, my first gray hair came. I wanted to speak with the handsome monk, but I saw him rarely and only for an instant. Now and then his proud countenance came before me and then vanished and my longing for him followed him like an invisible shadow. I asked Misha about him. "Oh," Misha cried, "that one! That animal! He was sent away from the military for gambling in cards and from the seminary for his scandals with women. A learned one, yes! He fell into the seminary from the military, cheated all the monks in the monastery of Chudoff; then came here, bought himself in with seven and a half thousand rubles, donated land and so won great respect. Here, too; they play cards. The Abbot, the steward and the treasurer, they all play with him. There is a girl who visits him--oh, the pigs! He has a separate apartment, and there he lives just as he pleases. The great filth of it!" I did not believe him; I could not. One day I asked the steward, Father Isador, to help me gain an interview with the Abbot. "An interview about what?" "About faith." "What do you mean, 'about faith'?" "I have various questions." He looked me over from head to toe. He was a head taller than I, thin, angular, with wise, smiling eyes, a long, crooked nose and a pointed beard. "Speak plainly; your flesh masters you?"