"I may tell you," at length the crook-backed old woman remarked as she attempted to straighten herself, "that though my husband was not without enemies, he also had a particular friend named Andrei, and that when failing strength was beginning to make life difficult for us in our old home on the Don, and folk took to reviling and girding at my husband, Andrei came to us one day, and said: 'Yakov, let not your hands fail you, for the earth is large, and in all parts has been given to men for their use. If folk be cruel, they are so through stupidity and prejudice, and must not be judged for being so. Live your own life. Let theirs be theirs, and yours yours, so that, dwelling in peace, while yielding to none, you shall in time overcome them all.'"
"That is what Vasil too used to say. He used to say: 'Let theirs be theirs, and ours ours.'"
"Aye, never a good word dies, but, wheresoever it be uttered, flies thence through the world like a swallow."
Ufim corroborated this with a nod.
"True indeed!" he remarked. "Though also it has been said that a good word is Christ's, and a bad word the priest's."
One of the old women shook her head vigorously at this, and croaked:
"The badness lies not in any word of a priest, but in what you yourself have just said. You are greyheaded, Ufim, yet often you speak without thought."
Presently Ufim's wife reappeared, and, waving her hands as though she were brandishing a sieve, began to vent renewed volleys of virulent abuse.
"My God," she cried, "what sort of a man is that? Why, a man who neither speaks nor listens, but for ever keeps baying at the moon like a dog!"
"NOW she's started!" Ufim drawled.