Fyokla saw of course that Granny wanted something, but could not tell what it was. She wondered and wondered what to do and in the end undid the pin and ran out of the room.…”

Here Nastenka stopped and began laughing. I, too, burst out laughing with her, which made her stop at once.

“Look, you mustn’t laugh at Granny. I’m laughing because it was so funny.… Well, anyway. I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Granny is like that, but I do love the poor old dear a little for all that. Well, I did catch it properly that time. I was at once told to sit down in my old place, and after that I couldn’t make a move without her noticing it.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you that we live in our own house, I mean, of course, in Granny’s house. It’s a little wooden house, with only three windows, and it’s as old as Granny herself. It has an attic, and one day a new lodger came to live in the attic.…”

“There was an old lodger then?” I remarked, by the way.

“Yes, of course, there was an old lodger,” replied Nastenka, “and let me tell you, he knew how to hold his tongue better than you. As a matter of fact, he hardly ever used it at all. He was a very dried up old man, dumb, blind and lame, so that in the end he just could not go on living and died. Well, of course, we had to get a new lodger, for we can’t live without one: the rent we get from our attic together with Granny’s pension is almost all the income we have. Our new lodger, as it happened, was a young man, a stranger who had some business in Petersburg. As he did not haggle over the rent, Granny let the attic to him, and then asked me, ‘Tell me, Nastenka, what is our lodger like—is he young or old?’ I didn’t want to tell her a lie, so I said, ‘He isn’t very young, Granny, but he isn’t very old, either.’

“ ‘Is he good-looking?’ Granny asked.

“Again I didn’t want to tell her a lie. ‘He isn’t bad-looking, Granny,’ I said. Well, so Granny said, ‘Oh dear, that’s bad, that’s very bad! I tell you this because I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself over him. Oh, what terrible times we’re living in! A poor lodger and he would be good-looking too! Not like the old days!’

“Granny would have liked everything to be like the old days! She was younger in the old days, the sun was much warmer in the old days, the milk didn’t turn so quickly in the old days—everything was so much better in the old days! Well, I just sat there and said nothing, but all the time I was thinking, Why is Granny warning me? Why did she ask whether our lodger was young and good-looking? Well, anyway, the thought only crossed my mind, and soon I was counting my stitches again (I was knitting a stocking at the time), and forgot all about it.

“Well, one morning our lodger came down to remind us that we had promised to paper his room for him. One thing led to another, for Granny likes talking to people and then she told me to go to her bedroom and fetch her accounts. I jumped up, blushed all over—I don’t know why—and forgot that I was pinned to Granny. I never thought of undoing the pin quietly, so that our lodger shouldn’t notice, but dashed off so quickly that I pulled Granny’s armchair after me. When I saw that our lodger knew all about me now, I got red in the face, stopped dead as though rooted to the floor, and suddenly burst into tears. I felt so ashamed and miserable at that moment that I wished I was dead! Granny shouted at me, ‘What are you standing there like that for?’ But that made me cry worse than ever. When our lodger saw that I was ashamed on account of him, he took his leave and went away at once!

“Ever since that morning I’ve nearly fainted every time I’ve heard a noise in the passage. It must be the lodger, I’d think, and I’d undo the pin very quietly just in case it was he. But it never was our lodger. He never came. After a fortnight our lodger sent word with Fyokla that he had a lot of French books, and that they were all good books which he knew we would enjoy reading, and that he would be glad to know whether Granny would like me to choose a book to read to her because he was sure she must be bored. Granny accepted our lodger’s kind offer gratefully, but she kept asking me whether the books were good books, for if the books were bad, she wouldn’t let me read them because she didn’t want me to get wrong ideas into my head.”

“ ‘What wrong ideas, Granny? What’s wrong with those books?’

“ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s all about how young men seduce decent girls, and how on the excuse that they want to marry them, they elope with them and then leave them to their own fate, and how the poor creatures all come to a bad end. I’ve read a great many such books,’ said Granny, ‘and everything is described so beautifully in them that I used to keep awake all night, reading them on the quiet.