The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment...then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....

" Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.

"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little Masha's crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin--it's all so incomprehensible and difficult.

And on the top of it all, the death of these children.

" And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother's heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.