Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/255

. How can the devil help living when he has swiped a lot.

. Who is the man there on the oven?

. Oh, just a man. (Silence.)

. Well, I saw you lately eating supper, and it was a mighty good capital.

. We can't complain. She is not stingy on that. White bread on Sundays, fish on holiday fasts, and if you want to, you may eat meat.

. Do they not keep the fasts?

. Hardly one of them does. The only ones who keep the fasts are the coachman (not the one that was here, but an old fellow), and Semén, and I, and the housekeeper; the rest chew meat.

. Well, and he himself?

. What are you about? He has even forgotten what a fast means.

. O Lord!

. That is the gentlemen's way,—they have come to it from books, because it is intelligentness!

. Bolted bread every day, I suppose?

. Oh, bolted bread! They don't know what your bolted bread is! You ought to see their food! What do they not have?

. The gentlemen's food, naturally, is airlike.

. That's it, airlike, and they are great hands at chewing.

. That means that they have appetites, so to speak.

. And so they wash it down. All those sweet wines, brandy, frothing liquors, at every course a different one. They eat and wash it down, they eat and wash it down.