"I was sorry to disturb you. Maybe you were seeing a happy vision."
"I didn't see anything."
"All the same—but your smile pleased me. It was so calm, so good—so great." Liudmila laughed, and her laugh sounded velvety. "I thought of you, of your life—your life is a hard one, isn't it?"
The mother, moving her eyebrows, was silent and thoughtful.
"Of course it's hard!" exclaimed Liudmila.
"I don't know," said the mother carefully. "Sometimes it seems sort of hard; there's so much of all, it's all so serious, marvelous, and it moves along so quickly, one thing after the other—so quickly——"
The wave of bold excitement familiar to her overflowed her breast, filling her heart with images and thoughts. She sat up in bed, quickly clothing her thoughts in words.
"It goes, it goes, it goes all to one thing, to one side, and like a fire, when a house begins to burn, upward! Here it shoots forth, there it blazes out, ever brighter, ever more powerful. There's a great deal of hardship, you know. People suffer; they are beaten, cruelly beaten; and everyone is oppressed and watched. They hide, live like monks, and many joys are closed to them; it's very hard. And when you look at them well you see that the hard things, the evil and difficult, are around them, on the outside, and not within."
Liudmila quickly threw up her head, looked at her with a deep, embracing look. The mother felt that her words did not exhaust her thoughts, which vexed and offended her.
"You're not speaking about yourself," said her hostess softly.