But I!... For myself, for my future, I renounced all hopes, at that time. When suffering reaches the point of making our whole being creak and groan, like an overloaded cart, it ought to cease to be ridiculous ... but no! laughter not only accompanies tears to the end, to exhaustion, to the impossibility of shedding more--it even rings and echoes, where the tongue is dumb, and complaint itself is dead.... And so, as in the first place I don't intend to expose myself as ridiculous, even to myself, and secondly as I am fearfully tired, I will put off the continuation, and please God the conclusion, of my story till tomorrow.... _March 29. A slight frost; yesterday it was thawing._ Yesterday I had not the strength to go on with my diary; like Poprishtchin, I lay, for the most part, on my bed, and talked to Terentyevna. What a woman! Sixty years ago she lost her first betrothed from the plague, she has outlived all her children, she is inexcusably old, drinks tea to her heart's desire, is well fed, and warmly clothed; and what do you suppose she was talking to me about, all day yesterday? I had sent another utterly destitute old woman the collar of an old livery, half moth-eaten, to put on her vest (she wears strips over the chest by way of vest) ... and why wasn't it given to her? 'But I'm your nurse; I should think... Oh ... oh, my good sir, it's too bad of you ... after I've looked after you as I have!' ... and so on. The merciless old woman utterly wore me out with her reproaches.... But to get back to my story. And so, I suffered like a dog, whose hindquarters have been run over by a wheel. It was only then, only after my banishment from the Ozhogins' house, that I fully realised how much happiness a man can extract from the contemplation of his own unhappiness. O men! pitiful race, indeed!