If your aunt, who used to be a tough country teacher, who is now almost eighty and balding, whose face and voice make your three-year-old hide behind the largest chair in the room, and who can hardly walk after her recent stroke, not to mention her perennial problems with varicose veins, if she tells you, after you insisted playfully for a few minutes, that the greatest and practically the only joy left to her is the abominable cross-word puzzles in the daily press, and if she tells you this with a shade of embarrassment visible only in her joviality, well, then do not take this as a great revelation, but compare this tragically reduced existence with that of your own, when you will realize, I am almost sure, that, after all, there is not such a great difference between you and your aunt, that is, that there exists only a difference in the degree of pettiness of your joys, and you will wonder, naturally, that you have been, until now, unaware of all this, unaware of the triviality that has seeped into your blood and bones, and especially since you got that job in the institute, however well paid and secure, and you will become aware, but only now, after your exercise, that all this is quite acceptable, since everybody, I am sure, will ultimately come to the same conclusion. You will realize that she has been aware of this for many years, although not in the same way, but only intuitively, without much reflection, which made her bitter and sweet, alternately, a bit eccentric and sometimes hard to bear. And you will laugh freely, or maybe with a shade of embarrassment, together with your old aunt, who used to take you out for long walks when you were a three-year-old, who bought candy for you, regardless of the strict orders of her sister to the contrary, and whose husband of Russian origin died in a mental institution, some thirty years ago, as a drunkard. Her face will light up, and your son will come to sit in your lap.