White Nights: Second Night

(Including the first part of "Nastenka's Story".   Perhaps you'd like to read the First Night before reading this, though?)

"The upshot of it is, we must begin all over again, because the conclusion I reached to-day was that I don't know you at all;...."

"Come, make haste -- begin -- tell me your whole history.  'My history!' I cried in alarm.  'My history! But who has told you I have a history?  I have no history...' "

"And so let us begin my history!   Half my story you know already -- that is, you know that I have an old grandmother ..."

"I have an old grandmother.  I came into her hands when I was quite a little girl, for my father and mother are dead."

"It was at that time I got into mischief; what I did I won't tell you; it's enough to say that it wasn't very important.  But grandmother called me to her one morning and said that as she was blind she could not look after me; she took a pin and pinned my dress to hers, and said that we should sit like that for the rest of our lives if, of course, I did not become a better girl.  In fact, at first it was impossible to get away from her:  I had to work, to read and to study all beside grandmother."

"I tried to deceive her once, and persuaded Fyokla to sit in my place.  Fyokla is our charwoman."

"...so then we had to find a new lodger, for we could not live without a lodger -- the rent, together with grandmother's pension, is almost all we have."

"But the new lodger, as luck would have it, was a young man, a stranger not of these parts."

 
  

(More to follow....) 

Comments

[Asimburney]

I LOVE these... don't keep us waiting for the next edition!

[katherine]

No worries -- the next two are already written and saved as draft. I just needed to keep at them steadily so it wasn't so much to screencap all at once.

:-)