no desire to become her lover, which she probably looked upon as
an insult, or perhaps because she felt that I was a man of a different
order, she hated me from the first day. My inexperience, my appearance
--so unlike a flunkey--and my illness, seemed to her pitiful and
excited her disgust. I had a bad cough at that time, and sometimes
at night I prevented her from sleeping, as our rooms were only
divided by a wooden partition, and every morning she said to me:

"Again you didn't let me sleep. You ought to be in hospital instead
of in service."

She so genuinely believed that I was hardly a human being, but
something infinitely below her, that, like the Roman matrons who
were not ashamed to bathe before their slaves, she sometimes went
about in my presence in nothing but her chemise.

Once when I was in a happy, dreamy mood, I asked her at dinner (we
had soup and roast meat sent in from a restaurant every day)

"Polya, do you believe in God?"

"Why, of course!"

"Then," I went on, "you believe there will be a day of judgment,
and that we shall have to answer to God for every evil action?"

She gave me no reply, but simply made a contemptuous grimace, and,
looking that time at her cold eyes and over-fed expression, I
realised that for her complete and finished personality no God, no
conscience, no laws existed, and that if I had had to set fire to