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 believe that his fortune was made. Of course it was not,
he never had luck with an invention again, but he was bursting with
pride and happiness, set up house for himself in a little flat on the
Vassily Ostrov--and met Vera Michailovna. I wish I could give some true
idea of the change that came over him when he reached this part of his
story. When he had spoken of his childhood, his father, his first
struggles to liv