“What do you think? You think the beast’s a fool? No, he is wiser than a man though you do call him a pig! He knows everything. Take this for instance. A man will pass along your track and not notice it; but a pig as soon as it gets onto your track turns and runs at once: that shows there is wisdom in him, since he scents your smell and you don’t. And there is this to be said too: you wish to kill it and it wishes to go about the woods alive. You have one law and it has another. It is a pig, but it is no worse than you—it too is God’s creature. Ah, dear! Man is foolish, foolish, foolish!” The old man repeated this several times and then, letting his head drop, he sat thinking. Olénin also became thoughtful, and descending from the porch with his hands behind his back began pacing up and down the yard. Eróshka, rousing himself, raised his head and began gazing intently at the moths circling round the flickering flame of the candle and burning themselves in it. “Fool, fool!” he said. “Where are you flying to? Fool, fool!” He rose and with his thick fingers began to drive away the moths. “You’ll burn, little fool! Fly this way, there’s plenty of room.” He spoke tenderly, trying to catch them delicately by their wings with his thick fingers and then letting them fly again. “You are killing yourself and I am sorry for you!” He sat a long time chattering and sipping out of the bottle. Olénin paced up and down the yard. Suddenly he was struck by the sound of whispering outside the gate. Involuntarily holding his breath, he heard a woman’s laughter, a man’s voice, and the sound of a kiss. Intentionally rustling the grass under his feet he crossed to the opposite side of the yard, but after a while the wattle fence creaked. A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and a white sheepskin cap passed along the other side of the fence (it was Luke), and a tall woman with a white kerchief on her head went past Olénin. “You and I have nothing to do with one another” was what Maryánka’s firm step gave him to understand. He followed her with his eyes to the porch of the hut, and he even saw her through the window take off her kerchief and sit down. And suddenly a feeling of lonely depression and some vague longings and hopes, and envy of someone or other, overcame the young man’s soul.