People do anything to get money; they
kill their souls for it. But for you money is so many little pieces
of paper, little bits of copper. You seem to keep it by you just
out of kindness to people."
Nikolay Ivanovich laughed softly.
"It's an awfully bothersome article, money is. Both to take it
and to give it is embarrassing."
He caught her hand, pressed it warmly, and asked again:
"So you will try to come soon, won't you?"
And he walked away quietly, as was his wont.
She got herself ready to go to him on the fourth day after his
visit. When the cart with her two trunks rolled out of the village
into the open country, she turned her head back, and suddenly had
the feeling that she was leaving the place forever--the place where
she had passed the darkest and most burdensome period of her life,
the place where that other varied life had begun, in which the next
day swallowed up the day before, and each was filled by an abundance
of new sorrows and new joys, new thoughts and new feelings.
The factory spread itself like a huge, clumsy, dark-red, spider,
raising its lofty smokestacks high up into the sky. The small
one-storied houses pressed against it, gray, flattened out on the
soot-covered ground, and crowded up in close clusters on the edge
of the marsh.
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