Of course she did not herself know whether she was listening or not; she could only have said, however it was, whether she heard or not, that she heard something, but she was very far from understanding what she heard; however, something she did hear, and something could be drawn from what she heard, that something was being done about something, and that it had no connection with her letter; and gradually she began to listen, because her mind was led to it. Her nerves wanted to occupy themselves with something, not with the letter; and though it was long before she could understand what he was driving at, yet she was reassured by the cool and contented tone of her husband’s voice, and gradually she began to understand.
“Do listen! because it is about a very important matter for me.” Her husband kept repeating each question, “Do you hear?”—“Yes, very pleasant changes for me”—and he begins to tell her the whole story in detail. She realizes three-quarters of what he is telling her—no, she knows it all; but it is all the same to her: “Let him speak! How kind he is!” And he keeps on with his story: that he has been tired of giving private lessons this long time, and why, or in what family, and of what special pupils he is tired, and how he is not tired of his occupation in the counting-room of the factory, because it is important, and he has a great influence over all the factory-hands, and how he has succeeded in doing something there; how he has enabled those who desired to learn to read and write; how he has taught them how to learn their letters; how he has succeeded in getting from the firm a salary for the teachers, by proving that the workmen would in this way ruin less machinery and less work, because in this way there would be less idleness and drunken eyes—of course it was a trifling salary; and how he keeps the working people from drinking, and in order to do this he has often been to their saloons—and a great deal of the same sort of talk. But the principal thing was this, that he has made himself solid with the firm as an active, energetic man, and he has been gradually getting the business into his own control, so that the conclusion of his story and the main flavor of it for Lopukhóf consisted in this: he has accepted the place as acting manager of the factory. The nominal manager would be an honorary person from the firm itself, with an honorary salary, but the active manager would be Lopukhóf himself: the member of the firm accepted the position of nominal manager only on this condition: “I,” says he, “cannot do it; how can I?”—“You take the name then, so that an honorable man may have it, and there will be no need for you to trouble yourself, for I will do everything.”—“If that is the case, all right then; I will take the position.” But the importance does not lie in his having the power, but in the fact that he is to have a salary of three thousand five hundred rubles—nearly a thousand rubles more than all taken together that he had received from his occasional hard literary work and from his pupils and from his former place in the factory; consequently he can give up everything now except the factory, and that is splendid. And all this takes more than half an hour to relate; and at the end of the story Viéra Pavlovna is able to say that it is really good, and she is able to arrange her hair and go to dinner.
And after dinner Masha gets eight silver kopeks for an izvoshchik, to take her in four different directions, to carry notes from Lopukhóf, saying, “I am at leisure, gentlemen, and I should be glad to have you come to see me.” And some time later appears the terrible Rakhmétof, and after him, one by one, come a whole tribe of young people, and a formidable scientific conversation begins with immeasurable reproaches heaped up on each individual by all the rest with all possible inconsequentialities; but some traitors to this lofty discussion help Viéra Pavlovna somehow or other to kill the evening, and when half the evening is spent she guesses where Masha has been gone so long. How kind he is! Yes, this time Viéra Pavlovna had been absolutely glad on account of her young friends, though she did not get into a gale with them, but sat quietly, and she was ready to kiss even Rakhmétof himself.
The visitors went away towards three o’clock in the morning, and they did well in being so late. Viéra Pavlovna, weary from the excitement of the day, had only just lain down when her husband came in:—
“While telling you about the factory, my dear Viérotchka, I forgot to tell you one thing about my new place, and by the way, it is not very important, and I don’t know as it is worth while to speak about it, but I will tell you some time; but I have one favor to ask: I want to sleep, so do you; so if I do not tell you the rest of the story now, we will speak about it tomorrow; and now I will tell you in two words. You see when I took the place of acting manager I agreed upon this condition: that I can take the place any time that I want, within a month or two; and now I want to avail myself of this time: I have not seen my old folks in Riazan for five years. I am going
