peated almost in a whisper: "Yes, yes, horrible. You've seen many drunken women? Many—my God! You, you must not write about that, you mustn't."
"Why?"
He looked straight into my eyes and smiling repeated: "Why?" Then thoughtfully and slowly he said: "I don't know. It just slipped out . . . it's a shame to write about filth. But yet why not write about it? Yes, it's necessary to write all about everything, everything."
Tears came into his eyes. He wiped them away, and, smiling, he looked at his handkerchief, while the tears again ran down his wrinkles. "I am crying," he said. "I am an old man. It cuts me to the heart when I remember something horrible."
And very gently touching me with his elbow, he said: "You, too—you will have lived your life, and everything will remain exactly as it was, and then you, too, will cry worse than I, more 'streamingly,' as the peasant women say. And everything must be written about, everything; otherwise that bright little boy might be hurt, he might reproach us—'it's untrue, it's not the whole truth,' he will say. He's strict for the truth."
Suddenly he gave himself a shake and said in a kind voice: "Now, tell me a story; you tell them well. Something about a child, about your childhood. It's not easy to believe that you were once a child. You are a strange creature, exactly as if you were born grown-up. In your ideas there is a
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