1 Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself.
2 Here in this city to-night ten thousand women are shut up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to live.
3 The next day, however, when no harm came of it and Juozapas began to cry with hunger, she gave in and said that he might go again.
4 They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.
5 If there were more of them on hand than chanced to be needed, the weaker ones died off of cold and hunger, again according to the stern system of nature.
6 Perhaps he ought to have meditated upon the hunger of the children, and upon his own baseness; but he thought only of Ona, he gave himself up again to the luxury of grief.
7 So long he had hungered to possess her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the right; that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no virtue of his.
8 He stretched out his arms to her, he called her in wild despair; a fearful yearning surged up in him, hunger for her that was agony, desire that was a new being born within him, tearing his heartstrings, torturing him.
9 But later on, what with sickness and cold and hunger and discouragement, and the filthiness of his work, and the vermin in his home, he had given up washing in winter, and in summer only as much of him as would go into a basin.
10 It would be a long time before he could be like the majority of these men of the road, who roamed until the hunger for drink and for women mastered them, and then went to work with a purpose in mind, and stopped when they had the price of a spree.