succeed I do not know; but I
will make the attempt. And should I, contrary to my expectations, prove
successful, I beg of you, in return for these my efforts, to renounce
all thought of benefit from the property which you have acquired.
Sincerely do I assure you that, were I myself to be deprived of my
property (and my property greatly exceeds yours in magnitude), I should
not shed a single tear. It is not the property of which men can deprive
us that matters, but the property of which no one on earth can deprive
or despoil us. You are a man who has seen something of life--to use
your own words, you have been a barque tossed hither and thither by
tempestuous waves: yet still will there be left to you a remnant of
substance on which to live, and therefore I beseech you to settle down
in some quiet nook where there is a church, and where none but plain,
good-hearted folk abide. Or, should you feel a yearning to leave behind
you posterity, take in marriage a good woman who shall bring you,
not money, but an aptitude for simple, modest domestic life. But
this life--the life of turmoil, with its longings and its
temptations--forget, and let it forget YOU; for there is no peace in
it. See for yourself how, at every step, it brings one but hatred and
treachery and deceit."

"Indeed, yes!" agreed the repentant Chichikov. "Gladly will I do as you
wish, since for many a day past have I been longing to amend my life,
and to engage in husbandry, and to reorder my affairs. A demon, the
tempter Satan himself, has beguiled me and led me from the right path."

Suddenly there had recurred to Chichikov long-unknown, long-unfamiliar
feelings. Something seemed to be striving to come to life again in
him--something dim and remote, something which had been crushed out of
his boyhood by the dreary, deadening education of his youthful days, by
his desolate home, by his subsequent lack of family ties, by the poverty
and niggardliness of his early impressions, by the grim eye of fate--an
eye which had always seemed to be regarding him as through a misty,
mournful, frost-encrusted window-pane, and to be mocking at his
struggles for freedom. And as these feelings came back to the penitent
a groan burst from his lips, and, covering his face with his hands, he
moaned: "It is all true, it is all true!"

"Of little avail are knowledge of the world and experience of men unless
based upon a secure foundation," observed Murazov. "Though you have
falle