d
been unremitting in her attention. The baby girl, on being left an
orphan, was adopted into the family of a tailor, who had three children
of his own. So there remained those unfortunate idle people, officials,
clerks, lackeys out of place, beggars, drunkards, dissolute women, and
children, who cannot be helped on the spot with money, but whom it is
necessary to know thoroughly, to be planned and arranged for. I had
simply sought unfortunate people, the unfortunates of poverty, those who
could be helped by sharing with them our superfluity, and, as it seemed
to me, through some signal ill-luck, none such were to be found; but I
hit upon unfortunates to whom I should be obliged to devote my time and
care.

CHAPTER VII.

The unfortunates whom I noted down, divided themselves, according to my
ideas, into three sections, namely: people who had lost their former
advantageous position, and who were awaiting a return to it (there were
people of this sort from both the lower and the higher class); next,
dissolute women, of whom there are a great many in these houses; and a
third division, children. More than all the rest, I found and noted down
people of the first division, who had forfeited their former advantageous
position, and who hoped to regain it. Of such persons, especially from
the governmental and official world, there are a very great number in
these houses. In almost all the lodgings which we entered, with the
landlord, Ivan Fedotitch, he said to us: "Here you need not write down
the lodger's card yourself; there is a man here who can do it, if he only
happens not to be intoxicated to-day."

And Ivan Fedotitch called by name and patronymic this man, who was always
one of those persons who had fallen from a lofty position. At Ivan
Fedotitch's call, there crawled forth from some dark corner, a former
wealthy member of the noble or official class, generally intoxicated and
always undressed. If he was not drunk, he always readily acceded to the
task proposed to him, nodded significantly, frowned, set down his remarks
in learned phraseology, held the card neatly printed on red paper in his
dirty, trembling hands, and glanced round at his fellow-lodgers with
pride and contempt, as though now triumphing in his education over those
who had so often humiliated him. He evidently enjoyed intercourse with
that world in which cards are printed on red paper, and with that world
of which he had once formed a pa