“Then, if it’s not your business, hold your tongue and listen.... The hen, my man, is none too fond of sitting.... All she cares for is just to lay her egg, and then go off again to the café-restaurant to lark about with the cocks, and sing songs, and make love.... Why, you may have a hen so frivolous that if you keep her three days on the eggs with a coop over her, you can’t make her sit on them; she just wriggles away to one side; she thinks to herself, like any fine lady, ‘If I take care of the children myself, I may spoil the shape of my bust, and no one will love me!’... And she wriggles away into a corner; and there the poor eggs lie, out in the cold.... Well, then, when you take off the coop,—up she jumps and off she runs, and clucks and cackles for all the farmyard to hear; and complains of how she was shut up and ill-treated; and the cock comes running up at her bidding to take her part; he’s sorry for her, you see! And off they go into the bushes, to the Islands,[43] to the Arcadia, and masked balls. Why, some hens are so larky that one doesn’t know how to manage them! So this is what the women do with a gay hen of that kind: they make little balls of bread, and dip them in spirits and give them to her.... The gay young hen eats them and gets tipsy; then they stick her on the eggs and put a coop over her.... Of course while she’s asleep she doesn’t think about dancing and masked balls; and by the time she wakes up, she’s got familiar like with the eggs.... Then, you know, the eggs get warm from her, and she feels the warmth of the eggs.... And when you take the coop off she can’t get up! She knows as well as any one that it would be fun to go off on the spree; she hears the cock calling her, and singing romances; she knows he’s going off to the Islands; and yet she can’t get up, her conscience won’t let her! She’s learned to pity her little ones; her soul has waked up.... And there she’ll sit, till she sits all the feathers off her body, and the flesh gets raw; she’ll sit till she aches all over! And why? Because of her conscience!... Her conscience puts all kind of thoughts into her head. She thinks about how she lived before she was married (she has so long to sit, you know, she has plenty of time to think), and how she went off on the spree, and what she saw, and how the cock came up to her (she’ll remember every feather on his body a hundred times over), and how it all happened, and then how she fell ill, and then how her baby was born, and how she cried when it was born—she’ll think over all that while she’s sitting.... Now, you see, all these thoughts go out of her soul into the chicken’s soul, like; and the chicken begins to think and feel as she does.... He gets all his soul from the hen, while he’s the least bit of a thing,—and ideas, and everything.... They’re just like little seeds, no bigger than a pin’s head, just stuck about here and there in him; and then of course they