The sergeant entered the outer courtyard, the gates of which happened to have been left open by chance. A strong smell of vodka came from him. With the suspicious eye of an inexperienced spy he examined the barns, the ice-cellar, and the kitchen. He wondered stupidly at the cleanliness of the yard and the tidiness of the new buildings. The sergeant was about to enter the kitchen in order to talk with some one about the business on which he had been sent, when quite suddenly he saw a young girl, one of the instructresses, Zinaida. She walked without haste in the yard, in a white-blue costume that reached to her knees. Zinaida had a cheerful, simple, sunburnt face. Her strong, bare arms swung lightly as she walked. It seemed as if the graceful girl were carried upon the earth without visible effort. The chaste openness of her chaste body naturally aroused hideous thoughts in the half-drunken idiot. And was it possible to be otherwise in our dark days? Even in the tale of a poet in love with beauty, the nudity of a chaste body calls out the judgment of hypocrites and the rage of people with perverted imaginations, as if it were the arrogant nudity of a prostitute. The austere virtue of these people is attached to them externally. It cannot withstand any kind of temptation or enticement. They know this, and cautiously guard themselves from seduction. But in secret they console their miserable imaginations with unclean pictures of back-street lewdness, cheap, and regulated, and almost undangerous for their health and the welfare of their families. The police sergeant, upon seeing the young girl, so lightly dressed, gave a lewd smile. His unclean desire stirred in his coarse body under its slovenly sweaty dress. He beckoned Zinaida to him with his crooked dirty finger and gave an idiotic laugh. He pushed his faded cap down to the back of his head. The young girl walked up to the police sergeant with a light easy gait. Thus walk queens of beloved free lands, barefoot virgins crowned with white flowers, queens of lands of which our too Parisian age does not know. The police sergeant whiffed his shag, vodka, and garlic at Zinaida, and smiling lasciviously, so that the green and the yellow of his crooked teeth showed conspicuously, he said: “Look-a-here, my pretty girl--d’ye live here?” Zinaida ingenuously marvelled at his red, dirty hands, at his red, provokingly perspiring face, his big, heavy, mud-bedraggled boots, and all those external tokens of the deformity of our poor, coarse life. They so quickly became unused to this deformity here in the valley of their beloved, innocent, tranquil life. Zinaida replied with an involuntary smile: “Yes, I live here in this colony.” The police sergeant asked: “Are you the cook? Or the laundress? What a nice piece of sugar-candy you are!”