has good reasons to expect
a job on the building of our railway bridge, and he's now waiting for an
answer about it. He knows the Drozdovs and Lizaveta Nikolaevna, through
Pyotr Stepanovitch."

The engineer sat, as it were, with a ruffled air, and listened with
awkward impatience. It seemed to me that he was angry about something.

"He knows Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch too."

"Do you know Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch?" inquired Stepan Trofimovitch.

"I know him too."

"It's...it's a very long time since I've seen Petrusha, and...I feel
I have so little right to call myself a father..._c'est le mot;_ I...how
did you leave him?"

"Oh, yes, I left him... he comes himself," replied Mr. Kirillov, in
haste to be rid of the question again. He certainly was angry.

"He's coming! At last I... you see, it's very long since I've see
Petrusha!" Stepan Trofimovitch could not get away from this phrase. "Now
I expect my poor boy to whom... to whom I have been so much to blame!
That is, I mean to say, when I left him in Petersburg, I... in short, I
looked on him as a nonentity, _quelque chose dans ce genre._ He was a very
nervous boy, you know, emotional, and... very timid. When he said his
prayers going to bed he used to bow down to the ground, and make the
sign of the cross on his pillow that he might not die in the night....
_Je m'en souviens. Enfin,_ no artistic feeling whatever, not a sign of
anything higher, of anything fundamental, no embryo of a future
ideal..._c'etait comme un petit idiot,_ but I'm afraid I am incoherent;
excuse me... you came upon me..."

"You say seriously that he crossed his pillow?" the engineer asked
suddenly with marked curiosity.

"Yes, he used to..."

"All right. I just asked. Go on."

Stepan Trofimovitch looked interrogatively at Liputin.

"I'm very grateful to you for your visit. But I must confess I'm...
not in a condition... just now... But allow me to ask where you are
lodging."

"At Filipov's, in Bogoyavlensky Street."

"Ach, that's where Shatov lives," I observed involuntarily.

"Just so, in the very same house," cried Liputin, "only Shatov lodges
above, in the attic, while he's down below, at Captain Lebyadkin's. He
knows Shatov too, and he knows Shatov's wife. He was very intimate with
her, abroad."

"_Comment!_ Do you really know anything about that unhappy marriage _de ce
pauvre ami_ and that woman," cried Stepan Trofimovitch, carried away
by sudden feeling. "You are the first ma