Ilya had not seen her for a long time, and looked at her now with mingled feelings of compassion and pleasure. She was dressed in ragged fustian, an old faded kerchief covered her head, her feet were bare. She moved with difficulty, but supporting herself with her hands on the wall, she crept slowly into Ilya's room, sat heavily in a chair, and spoke in a hoarse toneless voice: "I shall soon die. You see, I can hardly move my feet, and when I can't walk, I can't find food, and then I must die." Her face was horribly bloated and covered with dark flecks. The big eyes were hardly visible between the swollen lids. "What are you looking at?" she said to Ilya. "You think some one has struck me? No, it is a disease, devouring me." "What are you doing?" "I sit by the church door and beg for coppers," said Matiza, indifferently, in her deep, resonant voice. "I'm come on business. I heard from Perfishka that you were living here, and so I came." "May I give you some tea?" asked Lunev. It hurt him to hear Matiza's voice and see her big, slack body perishing visibly. "The devil wash his tail in your tea! Give me five kopecks, do! I came to you--well, you can ask me why." Speech was difficult. She breathed short, and an overpowering odour came from her. "Well, why?" asked Ilya, turning away and remembering how he had insulted her once. "Do you remember Mashutka? What? You've a poor memory! You've grown rich!" "I remember, of course I remember," said Ilya quickly. "What's the good of your remembering?" she interrupted. "Has that made her life any easier?" "What's the matter with her? How is she getting on?" Matiza's head swayed, and she said briefly: "She hasn't hanged herself yet." "Oh, speak out!" cried Ilya roughly. "What do you begin at me for? You sold her yourself for three roubles." "I don't reproach you, only myself," she answered quietly and emphatically, then began to tell of Masha, choking with the exertion. "Her old husband is jealous and torments her, he lets her go nowhere, not even into the shop. She sits in one room, and mayn't go into the courtyard without leave. He's got rid of his children somehow, and lives alone with Masha. He pinches her and ties her hands, he treats her so badly because his first wife was untrue, and the two children are not his. Masha has run away twice, but both times the police have brought her back, and the old man pinches her and starves her for it. See, what a life!" "Yes, you and Perfishka did a good deed," said Ilya gloomily. "I thought it was better," said the woman, in her toneless voice. Her face motionless as though carved in stone, and her dead voice, weighed on Ilya. "I thought--it was cleaner so. But the worse would have been better. She might have been sold to a rich man, he would have given her a home and clothes, and everything, and afterwards she would have sent him off and lived like all the others. Ever so many live like that." "Well, why have you come to me?" asked Ilya.