When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of those ladies who—you know what I mean. She was a Pole, and they called her Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with black, bushy eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a hatchet—the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a fishwife, inspired me with horror. I lived on the top flight and her garret was opposite to mine. I never left my door open when I knew her to be at home But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence. Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and she would smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and cynical. Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, touzled hair, and a particularly hideous smile. On such occasions she would speak to me:
"How d'ye do, Mr. Student!" and her stupid laugh would still further intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but my little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from the window, and it was always so quiet in the street below—so I endured.
And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the bass voice of Teresa the loathsome, resounded from my threshold:
"Good health to you, Mr. Student!"
"What do you want?" I said. I saw that her face was confused and supplicatory.... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.
"Look ye, sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?"
I lay there silent, and thought to myself:
"Gracious! An assault upon my virtue, neither more nor less.—Courage, my boy!"
"I want to send a letter home, that's what it is," she said, her voice was beseeching, soft, timid.
"Deuce take you!" I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table, took a sheet of paper, and said: