's mansion. Indeed, the candles had long been lit.

"What has delayed you?" asked the master of the house as Chichikov
entered the drawing-room.

"Yes, what has kept you and the Colonel so long in conversation
together?" added Platon.

"This--the fact that never in my life have I come across such an
imbecile," was Chichikov's reply.

"Never mind," said Kostanzhoglo. "Koshkarev is a most reassuring
phenomenon. He is necessary in that in him we see expressed in
caricature all the more crying follies of our intellectuals--of the
intellectuals who, without first troubling to make themselves acquainted
with their own country, borrow silliness from abroad. Yet that is
how certain of our landowners are now carrying on. They have set up
'offices' and factories and schools and 'commissions,' and the devil
knows what else besides. A fine lot of wiseacres! After the French War
in 1812 they had to reconstruct their affairs: and see how they have
done it! Yet so much worse have they done it than a Frenchman would have
done that any fool of a Peter Petrovitch Pietukh now ranks as a good
landowner!"

"But he has mortgaged the whole of his estate?" remarked Chichikov.

"Yes, nowadays everything is being mortgaged, or is going to be." This
said, Kostanzhoglo's temper rose still further. "Out upon your factories
of hats and candles!" he cried. "Out upon procuring candle-makers
from London, and then turning landowners into hucksters! To think of
a Russian pomiestchik [49], a member of the noblest of callings,
conducting workshops and cotton mills! Why, it is for the wenches of
towns to handle looms for muslin and lace."

"But you yourself maintain workshops?" remarked Platon.

"I do; but who established them? They established themselves. For
instance, wool had accumulated, and since I had nowhere to store it, I
began to weave it into cloth--but, mark you, only into good, plain cloth
of which I can dispose at a cheap rate in the local markets, and which
is needed by peasants, including my own. Again, for six years on end
did the fish factories keep dumping their offal on my bank of the river;
wherefore, at last, as there was nothing to be done with it, I took
to boiling it into glue, and cleared forty thousand roubles by the
process."

"The devil!" thought Chichikov to himself as he stared at his host.
"What a fist this man has for making money!"

"Another reason why I started those factories," continued Kostanzhoglo,
"is that