Do you think this is what I am working for ?" And he was seized with sardonic anguish, for he felt that his life was aimless if he should have no son to follow him.
During the nine years of their married life his wife had borne him four daughters, all of whom had passed away.

While Ignat had awaited their birth tremblingly, he mourned their death but little--at any rate they were unnecessary to him.

He began to beat his wife during the second year of their married life; at first he did it while being intoxicated and without animosity, but just according to the proverb: "Love your wife like your soul and shake her like a pear-tree;" but after each confinement, deceived in his expectation, his hatred for his wife grew stronger, and he began to beat her with pleasure, in revenge for not bearing him a son.
Once while on business in the province of Samarsk, he received a telegram from relatives at home, informing him of his wife's death.
He made the sign of the cross, thought awhile and wrote to his friend Mayakin: "Bury her in my absence; look after my property." Then he went to the church to serve the mass for the dead, and, having prayed for the repose of the late Aquilina's soul, he began to think that it was necessary for him to marry as soon as possible.
He was then forty-three years old, tall, broad-shouldered, with a heavy bass voice, like an arch-deacon; his large eyes looked bold and wise from under his dark eyebrows; in his sunburnt face, overgrown with a thick, black beard, and in all his mighty figure there was much truly Russian, crude and healthy beauty; in his easy motions as well as in his slow, proud walk, a consciousness of power was evident--a firm confidence in himself.

He was liked by women and did not avoid them.
Ere six months had passed after the death of his wife, he courted the daughter of an Ural Cossack.

The father of the bride, notwithstanding that Ignat was known even in Ural as a "pranky" man, gave him his daughter in marriage, and toward autumn Ignat Gordyeeff came home with a young Cossack-wife.