snow. I squatted there for a while. Then with both hands I scooped up snow from places which were still clean, and washed my face. I wept. "Where does this little path go? Where does this little path go?" I could hear indistinctly from the distance, like an auditory hallucination, the voice of a little girl singing. Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely
from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody. If I had ever attempted to voice anything in the nature of a protest, even a single mumbled word, the whole of society—and not only Flatfish—would undoubtedly have cried out flabbergasted, "Imagine the audacity of him talking like that?" Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don't know myself since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent. I got up from the snowbank with the thought: I ought to get the proper kind of medicine without delay. I went into a pharmacy nearby. The proprietress and I exchanged looks as I entered; for that instant her eyes popped and die held her bead lifted, as if caught in the light of a flash bulb. She stood ramrod stiff. But in her wide-open eyes there
