"Write 'if any one speaks tenderly to you, you are not to believe him. He wants to deceive you, and ruin you.'"
His face was flushed by his effort to keep back a cough. Tears stood in his eyes. He leaned on the table and pushed against me.
"You are hindering me!"
"It is all right; go on! 'Above all, never believe gentlemen. They will lead a girl wrong the first time they see her. They know exactly what to say. And if you have saved any money, give it to the priest to keep for you, if he is a good man. But the best thing, is to bury it in the ground, and remember the spot.'"
It was miserable work trying to listen to this whisper, which was drowned by the squeaking of the tin ventilator in the fortochka. I looked at the blackened front of the stove, at the china cupboard covered with flies. The kitchen was certainly very dirty, overrun with bugs, redolent with an acrid smell of burnt fat, kerosene, and smoke. On the stove, among the sticks of wood, cockroaches crawled in and out. A sense of melancholy stole over my heart. I could have cried with pity for the soldier and his sister. Was it possible, was it right that people should live like this?
I wrote something, no longer listening to Sidorov's whisper. I wrote of the misery and repulsiveness of life, and he said to me, sighing:
"You have written a lot; thank you. Now she will know what she has to be afraid of."
"There is nothing for her to be afraid of," I said angrily, although I was afraid of many things myself.
The soldier laughed, and cleared his throat.
"What an oddity you are! How is there nothing to be afraid of? What about gentlemen, and God? Is n't that something?"