I have given him something three times—does that go for nothing?
Let somebody else give him five kopeks for once!
I have done quite enough, coming out to the soup-kitchen in this weather, with my sick chest and a cough, and without a fur coat. Were I "pious," it would have been self-interest on my part. I should have done it with a view to acquiring merit, I should have hastened home, turned into bed, and gone to sleep, so that my soul might quickly fly to heaven and enter the good deed to her account.
The good deed is the "credit," and the "debit" a fat slice of Leviathan.
I, when I went to the soup-kitchen, had no reward in view, it was my kind nature that prompted me.
As I walked and praised myself thus, my heart felt warm again. If other people had been praising me, I must needs have been ashamed, and motioned them away with my hand, but I can listen to myself without blushing, and I should perhaps have gone on praising myself and have discovered other amiable traits in my character, had I not stepped with my half-soles—heaven knows, I had worn away the other half on the road to the soup-kitchen—stepped with my half-soles right into the mud.
"Those who are engaged in a religious mission come to no hurt!..." but that is probably on the way out. On the way home, when the newly-created angel is hastening heavenward, one may break one's neck.
My feet are wet, and I feel chilled all through. I know to a certainty that I shall catch cold, that I have caught cold already. Presently I shall be coughing my heart out, and I feel a sting in my chest. A terror comes over me. It is not long since I spent four weeks in bed.
"It's not a thing to do," I say to myself by way of reproach; "no, certainly not! It's all very well as far as you are concerned, but what about your wife and child? What right have you to imperil their support?"
If the phrase had been a printed one, and I the reader of it with my pencil in my hand, I should have known what to do—but the phrase was my own.