in the village, and at the same time examining the off-horse, Donskaya, which used to be his saddle-horse, a jaded but mettlesome steed, he began to view his experiences in an absolutely different light.
He felt himself again, and no longer wished to be a different person. He only wished to be better than he had ever been before. In the first lace, he resolved from that day forth that he would never expect extraordinary joys, such as marriage had promised to bring to him, and therefore he would never again despise the present; and, in the second place, he would never allow himself to be led away by low passion, the remembrances of which so tortured him while he was deciding to make his proposal. And lastly, as he thought of his brother Nikolaï, he resolved that he would never again forget him, but that he would keep track of him and not let him out of sight, so that he might be in readiness to aid him whenever the evil moment arrived, and that seemed likely to be very soon.
Then the conversation about communism, which he had so lightly treated with his brother, came back to him, and made him reflect. A reform of economic conditions seemed to him nonsense, but he always felt the unfair difference between his own superfluity and the poverty of the people, and in order that he might feel perfectly right, he now vowed that though hitherto he had worked hard, and lived economically, he would in the future work still harder, and permit himself even less luxury than ever. And all this seemed to him so easy to accomplish that, throughout the drive from the station, he was the subject of the pleasantest illusions. With a hearty feeling of hope for a new and better life, he reached home just as the clock was striking ten.
From the windows of the room occupied by his old nurse, Agafya Mikhaïlovna, who fulfilled the functions of housekeeper, the light fell on the snow-covered walk before his house. She was not yet asleep. Kuzma, wakened by her, hurried down, barefooted and sleepy, to open the door. Laska, the setter, almost knocking Kuzma down in her desire to get ahead of him, ran to
