would understand, one might get twenty thousand for the idea alone! Even you would understand if I were to tell you about it. Only you … don’t chatter about it … not a word … but I fancy I have talked to you about it already. Have I talked to you about sausage-skins?”

“M’m … by and by.”

“I believe I have.… Do you see the point of it? Now the provision shops and the sausage-makers get their sausage-skins locally, and pay a high price for them. Well, but if one were to bring sausage-skins from the Caucasus where they are worth nothing, and where they are thrown away, then … where do you suppose the sausage-makers would buy their skins, here in the slaughterhouses or from me? From me, of course! Why, I shall sell them ten times as cheap! Now let us look at it like this: every year in Petersburg and Moscow and in other centres these same skins would be bought to the … to the sum of five hundred thousand, let us suppose. That’s the minimum. Well, and if.…”

“You can tell me to-morrow … later on.…”

“Yes, that’s true. You are sleepy, pardon, I am just going … say what you like, but with capital you can do good business everywhere, wherever you go.… With capital even out of cigarette ends one may make a million.… Take your theatrical business now. Why, for example, did Lentovsky come to grief? It’s very simple. He did not go the right way to work from the very first. He had no capital and he went headlong to the dogs.… He ought first to have secured his capital, and then to have gone slowly and cautiously.… Nowadays, one can easily make money by a theatre, whether it is a private one or a people’s one.… If one produces the right plays, charges a low price for admission, and hits the public fancy, one may put a hundred thousand in one’s pocket the first year.… You don’t understand, but I am talking sense.… You see you are fond of hoarding capital; you are no better than that fool Zagvozdkin, you heap it up and don’t know what for.… You won’t listen, you don’t want to.… If you were to put it into circulation, you wouldn’t have to be rushing all over the place.… You see for a private theatre, five thousand would be enough for a beginning.… Not like Lentovsky, of course, but on a modest scale … in a small way. I have got a manager already, I have looked at a suitable building.… It’s only the money I haven’t got.… If only you understood things you would have parted with your Five per cents … your Preference shares.…”

“No, merci.… You have fleeced me enough already.… Let me alone, I have been punished already.…”

“If you are going to argue like a woman, then of course …” sighs Nikitin, getting up. “Of course.…”

“Let me alone.… Come, go away and don’t keep me awake.… I am sick of listening to your nonsense.”

“H’m.… To be sure … of course! Fleeced … plundered.… What we give we remember, but we don’t remember what we take.”

“I have never taken anything from you.”

“Is that so? But when we weren’t a celebrated singer, at whose expense did we live then? And who, allow me to ask, lifted you out of beggary and secured your happiness? Don’t you remember that?”

“Come, go to bed. Go along and sleep it off.”

“Do you mean to say you think I am drunk? … if I am so low in the eyes of such a grand lady … I can go away altogether.”

“Do. A good thing too.”

“I will, too. I have humbled myself enough. And I will go.”

“Oh, my God! Oh, do go, then! I shall be delighted!”