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 dependence to be placed on Stiva. I shall be able to bring them up with the assistance of excellent people; but if I have any more babies ...."

And it occurred to her how unjust was the saying that the curse laid on woman lay in the pangs of child-birth.

"Childbirth is nothing, but pregnancy is such misery," she said to herself, recalling the last experience of the sort, and the death of the child. And the thought brought to mind her talk with the young wife at the post-house. When asked if she had children, this peasant woman had answered cheerfully:—

"I had one daughter, but God relieved me of her; she was buried in Lent.

"And you are very sad about her?"

"Why should I be? father has plenty of grandchildren, as it is, and she would have been only one care more! You can't work or do anything; it hinders everything."

This reply had seemed revolting to Darya Aleksandrovna, in spite of the young peasant-woman's appearance of good nature, but now she could not help recalling what she had said. There was certainly a grain of truth in those cynical words.

"Yes, and as a general thing," said Darya Aleksandrovna, as she looked back over the fifteen years of her married life, "pregnancy, nausea, dullness of spirits, indifference to everything, and worst of all, ugliness. Kitty, our little, young, pretty Kitty, how ugly even she has grown, and I know well what a fright I become when I am in that condition. The birth-pains, the awful sufferings, and that last moment.... then the nursing of the children, the sleepless nights, the agonies...."

Darya Aleksandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the agony which with almost every one of her children she had suffered from broken breast.

Then the illnesses of the children, that panic of fear, then their education, their evil disposition; she recalled little Masha's disobedience in going to the raspberry bush; the lessons, Latin—everything that is so incomprehensible and hard. And, above all, the death of these children.