sed anyone to look into or decide anything
concerning her magazine. Their decision was that, having founded the
magazine, she should at once hand it over to them with the capital to
run it, on the basis of a co-operative society. She herself was to
go back to Skvoreshniki, not forgetting to take with her Stepan
Trofimovitch, who was "out of date." From delicacy they agreed to
recognise the right of property in her case, and to send her every year
a sixth part of the net profits. What was most touching about it
was that of these five men, four certainly were not actuated by any
mercenary motive, and were simply acting in the interests of the
"cause."

"We came away utterly at a loss," Stepan Trofimovitch used to say
afterwards. "I couldn't make head or tail of it, and kept muttering, I
remember, to the rumble of the train:

'Vyek, and vyek, and Lyov Kambek,
Lyov Kambek and vyek, and vyek.'

and goodness knows what, all the way to Moscow. It was only in Moscow
that I came to myself--as though we really might find something
different there."

"Oh, my friends!" he would exclaim to us sometimes with fervour, "you
cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a
great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the
ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street,
and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognisable, in the mud,
absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of
foolish louts! No! In our day it was not so, and it was not this for
which we strove. No, no, not this at all. I don't recognise it.... Our
day will come again and will turn all the tottering fabric of to-day
into a true path. If not, what will happen?..."

VII

Immediately on their return from Petersburg Varvara Petrovna sent her
friend abroad to "recruit"; and, indeed, it was necessary for them to
part for a time, she felt that. Stepan Trofimovitch was delighted to go.

"There I shall revive!" he exclaimed. "There, at last, I shall set to
work!" But in the first of his letters from Berlin he struck his usual
note:

"My heart is broken!" he wrote to Varvara Petrovna. "I can forget
nothing! Here, in Berlin, everything brings back to me my old past, my
first raptures and my first agonies. Where is she? Where are they both?
Where are you two angels of whom I was never worthy? Where is my son, my
beloved son? And last of all, where am I, where is my o