On "One of Life's Trivia" by Anton Chekhov

This is the story of a little child - a child who has all the innocence of his childhood - and a grown-up man - a "big and serious man, could not be bothered by boys and their feelings". It talks about how this man betrayed the little kid, how he cruelly hurt the boys feelings and mercilessly trampled upon them, crushing them into the deep deep earth - the wet mold of the boy's heart

The boy - a mere child of eight- trusted this man with a little secret of his; and also made him promise that he would not divulge this to his mother. The man gave his solemn word that he wouldn't. But did he care? He was too involved in his own inflated ego, his own apparent "unhappiness"; he was too keen to prove himself "innocent". The beauty of the story lies not in the secret which the boy confided in the man; the beauty lies in the way Chekhov reveals the chasm between the world of Men and the world of Children. What the man did has "no name in a child's vocabulary", but it has a name in a grown-up's vocabulary - DECEIT.