"I cannot take it."
"Why not?"
"Because I know what the others would say. They would joke and tease me about your being my lover, and I should get so tormented that I could not stay in the place."
Ivan was so confounded by this naïve explanation, given without the slightest confusion, that he could make no answer. He counted out the usual week's wages, which she stowed away in the bosom of her bodice, wished him good morning, and went her way.
He remained, his thoughts in a maze. In all his experience—and he had a good deal, for his time had not been always spent in Bondavara, and out in the world he had known many women—he had known no woman like this.
She is afraid they will say I am her lover; she is afraid they will tease her so much on that account that she may have to leave the place! Has she, then, no idea that once I, the master, loved a girl here, she would not push the wheelbarrow any more? Does she even know what a lover is? She knows well that she must guard herself against one. Poor child! How earnest she was, and yet she laughed, and she did not know why she laughed, nor yet why she was grave. A savage in the guise of an angel!
He got up, locked his desk, and turned to leave his office; then again remained, thinking.
She is unlike every other woman. I doubt if she knows how beautiful she is, or what is the worth of beauty. She is Eve, a perfect copy of Eve—the Eve of Scripture, and the Eve of Milton. She is Eve, in not knowing wherefore she should blush over her own nakedness—the type of the beautiful in its primitive state, unwashed, savage, with hair unconfined, who wanders through the garden, fearing nothing, and even playing with a serpent. With men she is a woman, by herself she is a child, and yet she displays a motherly care for her little brother. Her figure is a model for a sculptor, her countenance is full of mind, her eyes bewitching, her voice melodious; and yet her hands are hard with the barrow-poles, her mind is troubled with sordid cares for her daily bread, her face is covered with coal-smut, and she has learned her songs in the street.
"The worse for her!" and, after a pause, Ivan added with a sigh, "and the worse for another besides her."
In his mind a total revolution had taken place. The intellectual spirits had for the nonce deserted him, and in their place others had come of a very different order—those demons which the blessed Antony had fought with such good effect in the desert.