“Nothing to speak of; it was only as if something hot had blown against my leg.”

“Well, and afterwards?”

“And afterwards it was nothing much either, only it did smart when they drew the skin together. The chief thing, your honour, is not to think: if you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes of thinking.”

At this moment a woman in a grey striped dress, with a black kerchief on her head, approaches you and joins in your conversation with the sailor. She begins to tell you about him: of his sufferings, the desperate condition he was in for four weeks; how, when he was wounded, he stopped his stretcher-bearers that he might see a volley from our battery; how the Grand-Dukes had spoken to him and given him twenty-five roubles, and he had told them he would like to return to the battery to teach the youngsters, if he could no longer work himself. As she says this all in a breath, the woman constantly looks from you to the sailor⁠—who, with his face turned from her, is picking lint on his pillow⁠—and her eyes are bright with some peculiar rapture.