Gorky: Autobio: Childhood

Reading. Finished Barnes' Arthur and George (after watching the PBS series) and have moved on to Gorky. I've tried some stories before and gave up. This time starting with his autobio (I have two of three parts) and enjoying it. This snippet is about his grandmother (paragraphs be damned.:)):

“But why do people abandon children?” “It is because the mother has no milk, or anything to feed her baby with. Then she hears that a child which has been born somewhere lately is dead, and she goes and leaves her own there.” She paused and scratched her head; then sighing and gazing at the ceiling, she continued: “Poverty is always the reason, Oleysha; and a kind of poverty which must not be talked about, for an unmarried girl dare not admit that she has a child people would cry shame upon her. “Grandfather wanted to hand Vaniushka over to the police, but I said ‘No, we will keep him ourselves to fill the place of our dead ones. For I have had eighteen children, you know. If they had all lived they would have filled a street eighteen new families! I was married at eighteen, you see, and by this time I had had fifteen children, but God so loved my flesh and blood that He took all of them all my little babies to the angels, and I was sorry and glad at the same time.” Sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightdress, huge and dishevelled, with her black hair falling about her, she looked like the bear which a bearded woodman from Cergatch had led into our yard not long ago. Making the sign of the cross on her spotless, snow-white breast, she laughed softly, always ready to make light of everything.