"Well, do you think your wife will know anything about it?"
"My wife would always know if I lived unchastely. I can't deceive her, my brother."
"How can she know?"
"That I can't say, but she is bound to know, while she lives chaste herself; and if I lead a chaste life, and she were to sin, I should know it."
"But how?" cried Ephimushka, but Grigori repeated calmly:
"That I can't say."
The slater waved his hands agitatedly.
"There, if you please! Chaste, and does n't know! Oh, you blockhead!"
Shishlin's workmen, numbering seven, treated him as one of themselves and not as their master, and behind his back they nicknamed him "The Calf."
When he came to work and saw that they were lazy, he would take a trowel, or a spade, and artistically do the work himself, calling out coaxingly: