"Well," he asked, as Ilya stopped, "Said all you want to?"
"Ye—ss, yes," stammered Ilya, a little frightened.
"Come here!"
Ilya went nearer to the desk. His master caught hold of his chin, turned his face up, looked him in the face with screwed-up eyes, then asked:
"Have you heard any one say that or did you think it yourself?"
"I thought of it—really and truly."
"Oh! If you thought it yourself, all right, but I'll just tell you one thing, in future have the goodness not to talk to your employer like that, you understand—your employer. Bear that in mind, and now get to your work!"
And when Karp returned, the merchant began suddenly to speak to him, for no apparent reason, constantly looking sideways at Ilya, so openly, that the boy quickly noticed it:
"A man must follow his business all his life—all—his—life! Whoever does not is an ass. How can a man live without something to do? A man who isn't absorbed in his business, is good for nothing."
"Of course, I quite agree, Kiril Ivanovitch," said the shopman, letting his glance travel round the shop as if he was seeking something more to do. Ilya looked at his employer and fell into deep thought. Life to him among these men became more and more tedious. The days dragged on one after the other like long grey threads, unrolling from some mighty unseen skein. And it seemed to him that these days would never come to an end, but that all his life long he would stand at this shop door and listen to the tumult of the market-place. But his intelligence, already awakened by early experience and by the reading of books, was not hampered by the drowsy influence of this monotonous life, and worked on without a pause, though perhaps more slowly. Every day the lad's soul received new impressions which simmered within him, and filled his head with a cloud of ideas concerning all that passed around him. He had no one to whom he could pour out his thoughts, which were therefore hidden, in his own breast. They were many, very many—they tortured him often, but they were without definite form, they melted one into the other, or contended in opposition and lay on brain and heart like a heavy load. Sometimes it was so painful to this serious silent lad to look on at the concourse of men that he would most gladly have closed his eyes or gone somewhere far, far away—farther than Pashka Gratschev had gone—never to return to this grey dulness and incomprehensible human worthlessness.