Mr. James’s Reviews > The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil > Status Update

The painter did not know how to disillusion them, seeing that they were so pleased with being deluded. -- N.G.

"You see, I don't want anything that might suggest she is about to go to a ball or some fashionable party or something of that sort... Our balls, you know, have such a devastating effect on the spirit; so demanding, I mean... They destroy all the remains of our feelings... What I want is simplicity, as much simplicity as possible." -- N.G.

I.F.S. and His Aunt: She was a woman washing laundry in basins filled with black water; she was a woman cooking for children: comfort, cultural, and seasonal foods; she was a woman plowing with raw hands: cuts on fingertips and bruises on the dorsum of her nose; she was a woman that cared for an angry old man and birds that sang broken. In short, she was a woman without a woman's mercy.

We ought to explain here that the aunt judged a woman's beauty first of all by her eyebrows. -- N.G.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't hear a word. I must tell you that I had a cockroach in my left ear. Those damned Russians have thousands of cockroaches in their cottages. The agonies I suffered! No pen, sir, can describe it. And it still tickles. Keeps on tickling. An old woman, you know, did help me once in the most simple way..." -- N.G.

She climbed the pear trees and shook off the pears; she administered beatings to her lazy vassals with her own terrible hand and offered a glass of vodka to the deserving ones with the same terrible hand. Almost at one and the same time she would scold, dye the yarn, run the kitchen, make kvas and honey preserve. She was busy from morning till night and was in time to see to everything. -- N.G.

He was not, as a rule, very fond of reading, and if he happened to look into the fortune-telling book sometimes it was because he liked to find something familiar there, something he had read several times already. So does a city dweller go to his club every day, not in order to hear something new there, but in order to meet those of his cronies with whom he has been accustomed to chat from time immemorial. -- N.G.

A Terrible Vengeance: After a soft kiss on the cheek, she'll slit her father's throat. Even the Devil deserves a daughter's love.

"Why doesn't my father come? Doesn't he know it is time he was stabbed to death? I suppose he expects me to go for him..." -- NG

Smothered in the green foliage, they [the woods], and the wild flowers, too, crowd together along the margin of the flowering waters and, bending over, gaze into them, never for a moment tiring of the pastime, never for a moment averting their admiring, radiant glances from the stream, and they smile at it and greet it, waving their branches. But they dare not look into the Dnieper midstream [...]. -- NG