“One day he invited us to see him, and then he went at it. ‘Do just look what a good little wife he has! Isn’t she tender, fine, nicely brought up, affectionate, full of kindness for all the world? I say, my lad, have you forgotten how we daubed their door with pitch?’ I was full at that moment, drunk as may be; then he seized me by the hair and had me down upon the ground before I knew where I was. ‘Come along--dance; aren’t you Akoulka’s husband? I’ll hold your hair for you, and you shall dance; it will be good fun.’ ‘Dog!’ said I to him. ‘I’ll bring some jolly fellows to your house,’ said he, ‘and I’ll whip your Akoulka before your very eyes just as long as I please.’ Would you believe it? For a whole month I daren’t go out of the house, I was so afraid he’d come to us and drag my wife through the dirt. And how I did beat her for it!” “What was the use of beating her? You can tie a woman’s hands, but not her tongue. You oughtn’t to give them a hiding too often. Beat ’em a bit, then scold ’em well, then fondle ’em; that’s what a woman is made for.” Chichkoff remained quite silent for a few moments. “I was very much hurt,” he went on; “I began it again just as before. I beat her from morning till night for nothing; because she didn’t get up from her seat the way I liked; because she didn’t walk to suit me. When I wasn’t hiding her, time hung heavy on my hands. Sometimes she sat by the window crying silently--it hurt my feelings sometimes to see her cry, but I beat her all the same. Sometimes her mother abused me for it: ‘You’re a scoundrel, a gallows-bird!’ ‘Don’t say a word or I’ll kill you; you made me marry her when I was drunk, you swindled me.’ Old Aukoudim wanted at first to have his finger in the pie. Said he to me one day: ‘Look here, you’re not such a tremendous fellow that one can’t put you down;’ but he didn’t get far on that track. Marie Stépanovna had become as sweet as milk. One day she came to me crying her eyes out and said: ‘My heart is almost broken, Ivan Semionytch; what I’m going to ask of you is a little thing for you, but it is a good deal to me; let her go, let her leave you, daddy Ivan.’ Then she throws herself at my feet. ‘Do give up being so angry! Wicked people slander her; you know quite well she was good when you married her.’ Then she threw herself at my feet again and cried. But I was as hard as nails. ‘I won’t hear a word you have to say; what I choose to do, I do, to you or anybody, for I’m crazed with it all. As to Philka Marosof, he’s my best and dearest friend.’” “You’d begun to play your pranks together again, you and he?”