Having worked a week at Maria Semenovna’s, he wondered greatly about her life. One day she came to the kitchen, where he was sitting with his work, to wash a towel, and began to ask him how he was getting on. He told her of the wrong he had suffered from his brother, and how he now lived on his own allotment of land, separated from that of his brother.
“I thought I should have been better off that way,” he said. “But I am now just as poor as before.”
“It is much better never to change, but to take life as it comes,” said Maria Semenovna. “Take life as it comes,” she repeated.
“Why, I wonder at you, Maria Semenovna,” said the lame tailor. “You alone do the work, and you are so good to everybody. But they don’t repay you in kind, I see.”
Maria Semenovna did not utter a word in answer.
“I dare say you have found out in books that we are rewarded in heaven for the good we do here.”
“We don’t know that. But we must try to do the best we can.”
“Is it said so in books?”
“In books as well,” she said, and read to him the Sermon on the Mount. The tailor was much impressed. When he had been paid for his job and gone home, he did not cease to think about Maria Semenovna, both what she had said and what she had read to him.
XVII