And suddenly--it usually happened in spring, when everything on earth became so bewitchingly beautiful and something reproachfully wild was breathed down into the soul from the clear sky--Ignat Gordyeeff would feel that he was not the master of his business, but its low slave.

He would lose himself in thought and, inquisitively looking about himself from under his thick, knitted eyebrows, walk about for days, angry and morose, as though silently asking something, which he feared to ask aloud.

They awakened his other soul, the turbulent and lustful soul of a hungry beast.

Insolent and cynical, he drank, led a depraved life, and made drunkards of other people.

He went into ecstasy, and something like a volcano of filth boiled within him.