Volodin bent his head, wagged it to and fro and said:
"No, what's my life? A dog's life. Why did she bear me? What did she think then?"
Peredonov suddenly remembered yesterday's erli. "There," he thought, "he complains about his mother, because she bore him. He doesn't want to be Pavloushka. It's certain that he envies me. It may be that he's thinking of marrying Varvara and of getting into my skin." And he looked anxiously at Volodin.
He must try to marry him to someone.
At night in the bedroom Varvara said to Peredonov:
"You think that all these girls who are running after you are really good-looking? They're all trash, and I'm prettier than any of them."
She quickly undressed herself and, smiling insolently, showed Peredonov her rosy, graceful, flexible and beautiful body.
Though Varvara staggered from drunkenness and her face would have repelled any decent man with its flabby-lascivious expression, she really had the beautiful body of a nymph, with the head of a faded prostitute attached to it as if by some horrible black magic. And this superb body was for these two drunken and dirty-minded people merely the source of the vilest libidinousness.
And so it often happens in our age that beauty is debased and abused.