deal in the long run. Just as it is with their rent, so it is with the table. For instance, this dinner which I told you about cost five rubles and fifty kopeks, or five rubles and seventy-five kopeks, with bread, but without tea and coffee. At the table were thirty-seven people besides me and Viéra Pavlovna. Of course several children were included in that number. Five rubles and seventy-five kopeks for thirty-seven people makes less than sixteen kopeks[1] apiece, less than five rubles a month. And Viéra Pavlovna says that if a person dines by himself, he can have scarcely anything for this money except bread and such wretched stuff as you find at small stores. At a restaurant, a dinner like this, only not so nicely served, would cost forty kopeks, according to Viéra Pavlovna. For thirty kopeks it would be much worse. This difference can be appreciated; a restaurant keeper, while preparing a dinner for twenty people or less, must support himself on this money, must have a house, and have a servant. But here these extra expenses are entirely done away with, or are greatly diminished. The wages of two old women, who are relations of two of the sewing girls, and that is the whole expense of the kitchen stuff. Now you render the calculation which Kirsánof made for me by way of example, when I called upon them for the first time. After he wrote it, he said:—
"Of course I can't give exact figures, as it would be hard to get at them, because you know each mercantile enterprise, each selling shop, each sewing shop, has its own income and expense account, just as each family has its own degree of economy in incurring expenses with special proportions between their various expenditures. I am giving you the figures only by way of example; but to make the account more impressive, I shall make the figures less than the real profits of our concern, in comparison with the real expenses of almost every commercial enterprise and almost every poor family.
"The receipts of a commercial enterprise from the sale of goods," continued Kirsánof, "is divided into three main portions: one goes for the salary of the employees; the second for the other expenses of the concern, say the rent of the building, lights, materials for works; the third makes the khozyáïn's income. Let us suppose that the receipts are divided in this proportion: for the wages of the em-
- ↑ Eight cents.
