Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/50

26 She was of a very placid and peaceful temper.

Saranin growled: "Don't gorge yourself with meat, and don't gobble up so much floury food; the whole day you're stuffing yourself with sweets."

"Then I can't eat anything, if I've got a good appetite," said Aglaya. "When I was single, I had a better appetite still!"

"So I should think! Why, you ate up an ox at one go, didn't you?"

"It's impossible to eat up an ox at one go," replied Aglaya, placidly.

She quickly fell asleep, but Saranin could not get to sleep in this strange autumn night.

For a long time he tossed about from side to side.

When a Russian cannot eleep, he thinks about things. Saranin, too, devoted himself to that activity, which was so little peculiar to him at any other time. For he was an official,—and so had little reason to think about this and that.

"There must be some means or other," pondered Saranin. "Science makes marvellous discoveries every day; in America they make people noses of any shape they like, and put a new skin on their faces. That's the kind of operations they perform,—they bore holes in the skull, they cut into the bowels and the heart, and sew them up again. Can't there be a way of making me grow, or else of reducing Aglaya's size? Some