"Your young man would give you something if he knew about your behavior!"
She screwed up her pimply face contemptuously.
"I am not afraid of him! I have a dowry. I am much better than he is! A girl only has the time till she is married to amuse herself."
She began to play about with Pavl, and from that time I found in her an unwearying calumniator.
My life in the shop became harder and harder. I read church books all the time. The disputes and conversations of the valuers had ceased to amuse me, for they were always talking over the same things in the same old way. Petr Vassilich alone still interested me, with his knowledge of the dark side of human life, and his power of speaking interestingly and enthusiastically. Sometimes I thought he must be the prophet Elias walking the earth, solitary and vindictive. But each time that I spoke to the old man frankly about people, or about my own thoughts, he repeated all that I had said to the shopman, who either ridiculed me offensively, or abused me angrily.
One day I told the old man that I sometimes wrote his sayings in the note-book in which I had copied various poems taken out of books. This greatly alarmed the valuer, who limped towards me swiftly, asking anxiously:
"What did you do that for? It is not worth while, my lad. So that you may remember? No; you just give it up. What a boy you are! Now you will give me what you have written, won't you?"
He tried long and earnestly to persuade me to either give him the notebook, or to burn it, and then he began to whisper angrily with the shopman.
As we were going home, the latter said to me: "You have been taking notes? That has got to be' stopped! Do you hear? Only detectives do that sort of thing!"
Then I asked incautiously: