Natalia replied, with a sigh:
"A woman needs more strength than a man. She has to have strength enough for two, and God has bestowed it upon her. Man is an unstable creature."
She spoke calmly, without malice, sitting with her arms folded over her large bosom, resting her back against the fence, her eyes fixed sadly on the dusty gutter full of rubbish. Listening to her clever talk, I forgot all about the time. Suddenly I saw my master coming along arm in arm with the mistress. They were walking slowly, pompously, like a turkey-cock with his hen, and, looking at us attentively, said something to each other.
I ran to open the front door for them, and as she came up the steps the mistress said to me, venomously:
"So you are courting the washerwoman? Are you learning to carry on with ladies of that low class?"
This was so stupid that it did not even annoy me but I felt offended when the master said, laughing:
"What do you expect? It is time."
The next morning when I went into the shed for the wood I found an empty purse, in the square hole which was made for the hook of the door. As I had seen it many times in the hands of Sidorov I took it to him at once.
"Where is the money gone?" he asked, feeling inside the purse with his fingers. "Thirty rubles there were! Give them here!"
His head was enveloped in a turban formed of a towel. Looking yellow and wasted, he blinked at me angrily with his swollen eyes, and refused to believe that I had found the purse empty.