Christian’s attention somehow became fixed on a water jug with a broken handle. The jug was stamped with a greenish pattern and the banal arabesques bit into his mind. The snow-edged, slanting window in the roof troubled him, and the sight of a single muddy boot. Next a sad fascination came to him from a rope that dangled from the roof, and from a little coal-oil lamp with a smoky chimney. His mere bodily vision clung to these things. But they passed into his soul, and he merged into oneness with them. He himself was that broken jug with its green figures, the snow-edged window, the muddy boot, the dangling rope, the smoky lamp. He was being transformed as in a melting furnace, shape glided into shape; and although he was objectively aware of what was taking place and also of the people--the beggar, the woman, the children, Ivan Michailovitch, the agent, and those who waited outside--yet it cost him a passionate effort to keep them outside of himself for yet a little while, until they should plunge down upon his soul with their torment, despair, cruelty, and madness, like wild dogs throwing themselves upon a bone. A sigh escaped him; a disturbed and fleeting smile hovered about his lips. One of the children, a boy of four, clad in a shapeless rag, came to him, and gazed up at him as though he were a tower. At once the eyes of the others were fixed on him too. At least, he felt them. His breast seemed a fiery crucible upborne and held high by the boy’s emaciated arms. In a moment he had filled his hand with gold pieces, and by a gesture encouraged the child to hold out its hands. He poured the gold into them. But they could grasp only a few. The coins rolled on the floor, and the people there watched them in dumb amazement. He drew out his wallet, took from it with trembling fingers every bank note it held, looked about, and approached the cowering woman. Then suddenly there seized him a strange contempt for his own erectness while she crouched on the floor. And so he kneeled, kneeled down beside her, and let the notes slip into her lap. He did not know how much money there was. But it was found later that the sum was four thousand six hundred marks. He arose and took Ivan’s arm, and the latter understood his glance. There was a breathless silence when they left. The agent and his men, the lodgers, the children--all seemed turned to stone. The woman stared at the wealth in her lap. Then she uttered a loud cry and lost consciousness. The little boy played with the pieces of gold, and they clinked as only gold can, faintly sweet and without hardness.