mood—­one is even ill possibly—­and so nothing is done and the whole plan is ruined.  I would think all day as to how I would make myself resolute, and I would say when old Feodor Stepanovitch would pinch my ear and deny me more soup, ’Ah ha, you wait, you old pig-face—­you wait until I’ve mastered my resolution—­and then I’ll show you!’ I fancied, for instance, that if I could command myself sufficiently I could just go to people and say, ’You must have bath-houses like this and this’—­I had all the plans ready, you know, and in the hottest room you have couches like this, and you have a machine that beats your back—­so, so, so—­not those dirty old things that leave bits of green stuff all over you—­and so on, and so on.  But better ideas than that, ideas about poverty and wealth, no more kings, you know, nor police, but not your cheap Socialism that fellows like Boris Nicolaievitch shout about; no, real happiness, so that no one need work as I did for an old beast who didn’t give you enough soup, and have to keep quiet, all the same and say nothing.  Ideas came like flocks of birds, so many that I couldn’t gather them all but had sometimes to let the best ones go.  And I had no one to talk to about them—­only the old cook and the girl in the kitchen, who had a child by old Feodor that he wouldn’t own,—­but she swore it was his, and told every one the time when it happened and where it was and all....  Then the old man fell downstairs and broke his neck, and he’d left me some money to go on with the letters....”

At this point Markovitch’s face would become suddenly triumphantly malevolent, like the face of a schoolboy who remembers a trick that he played on a hated master.  “Do you think I went on with them, Ivan Andreievitch? no, not I... but I kept the money.”

“That was wrong of you,” I would say gravely.

“Yes—­wrong of course.  But hadn’t he been wrong always?  And after all, isn’t everybody wrong?  We Russians have no conscience, you know, about anything, and that’s simply because we can’t make up our minds as to what’s wrong and what’s right, and even if we do make up our minds it seems a pity not to let yourself go when you may be dead to-morrow.  Wrong and right....  What words!...  Who knows?  Perhaps it would have been the greatest wrong in the world to go on with the letters, wasting everybody’s time, and for myself, too, who had so many ideas, that life simply would never be long enough to think them all out.”

It seemed that shortly after this he had luck with a little invention, and this piece of luck was, I should imagine, the ruin of his career, as pieces of luck so often are the ruin of careers.  I could never understand what precisely his invention was, it had something to do with the closing of doors, something that you pulled at the bottom of the door, so that it shut softly and didn’t creak with the wind.  A Jew bought the invention, and gave Markovitch enough money to lead him confidently to