eighteen months?"

Madame Tcheprakov's son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our
railway-line. He had grown much thinner and feebler during the
winter, so that a single glass was enough to make him drunk, and
he shivered out of the sunshine. He wore the guard's uniform with
aversion and was ashamed of it, but considered his post a good one,
as he could steal the candles and sell them. My new position excited
in him a mixed feeling of wonder, envy, and a vague hope that
something of the same sort might happen to him. He used to watch
Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for dinner now, and his
lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish expression, and he moved
his fingers as though he were feeling my happiness with them.

"Listen, Better-than-nothing," he said fussily, relighting his
cigarette at every instant; there was always a litter where he
stood, for he wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette.
"Listen, my life now is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is
any subaltern can shout: 'Hi, there, guard!' I have overheard all
sorts of things in the train, my boy, and do you know, I have learned
that life's a beastly thing! My mother has been the ruin of me! A
doctor in the train told me that if parents are immoral, their
children are drunkards or criminals. Think of that!"

Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly,
his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as
though in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his
muddled talk were, "My mother! Where's my mother?" which he uttered
with a wail like a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led
him into our garden and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and