"It's very well that I'm teaching Grisha, but of course that's

only because I am free myself now, I'm not with child. Stiva,

of course, there's no counting on. And with the help of

good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there's another

baby coming?..." And the thought struck her how untruly it was

said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should

bring forth children.

"The birth itself, that's nothing; but the months of carrying the

child--that's what's so intolerable," she thought, picturing to

herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And

she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young

woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children,

the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully: "I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent."

"Well, did you grieve very much for her?" asked Darya

Alexandrovna.

"Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It

was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie."

This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite

of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now

she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words

there was indeed a grain of truth.

"Yes, altogether," thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over

her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married

life, "pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to

everything, and most of all--hideousness. Kitty, young and

pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I'm

with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the

hideous agonies, that last moment...then the nursing, the

sleepless nights, the fearful pains...."

Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain

from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.

"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension;

then bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little

Masha's crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin--it's all

so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the

death of these children." And there rose again before her

imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother's

heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of

croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little

pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at

the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples,

and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the

moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a

cross braided on it.




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