It was like work without hope, and despondency began to take hold of him.
When he put his shillings away in the tin box on Saturday, it was with bitter thoughts. At any moment his mother might come and swallow the whole of it—as she, of course, had a right to do, since he in his time had wasted all hers.
He had always thought that when it came to the point, it was he who had a reckoning to demand of his mother, because she had brought him into the world without being able to give him a father, and then let him go.
But now it seemed to be just the other way. His mother, with her all-consuming business, was the great, lawful gulf for all his happiness.
He began to be weary of it all.
Amid all this there sometimes dawned and smouldered a faint glow of rebellion within him, although, in his honest endeavour to come to the bottom of the truth, it was some time before it blazed up.
Should he let Silla go, too, into this same gulf?
The answer blazed up clearly, so that the flames shone and flickered:
"Not while there was a rag left of what was called Nikolai!"
And with reference to his mother, and his having perhaps brought misfortune upon her, should he not have hit out, but just let himself be insulted and trampled upon, as he was going to be again now? His mother, tall and big, would just squeeze them to death with that shop, both he and Silla. They were not even to have leave or the right to sigh.