An acquaintance of mine once told me the following story.
When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of
those ladies who--you know what I mean. She was a Pole, and they
called her Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with
black, bushy eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a
hatchet--the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her
cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a fishwife,
inspired me with horror. I lived on the top flight and her garret was
opposite to mine. I never left my door open when I knew her to be at
home But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence. Sometimes I
chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and she would
smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and cynical.
Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, touzled hair, and a
particularly hideous smile. On such occasions she would speak to me:
"How d'ye do, Mr. Student!" and her stupid laugh would still further
intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my
quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but my
little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from the
window, and it was always so quiet in the street below--so I endured.
And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort
of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the
bass voice of Teresa the loathsome, resounded from my threshold:
"Good health to you, Mr. Student!"
"What do you want?" I said. I saw that her face was confused and
supplicatory.... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.
"Look ye, sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?"