'Oh! that's nothing,' said Skudronzhoglo. 'Koshkaryov is a comforting phenomenon. He is of use because the follies of the intellectual people are reflected and caricatured in him and so are more apparent. They have set up offices, counting-houses and directors and works and factories, and schools and committees, and the devil only knows what, as though they had got an empire to govern! How do you like this, I ask you? A landowner has arable land and not enough peasants to work it, and he goes and sets up a candle factory; he gets candlemakers from London and goes into the trade! Then there is another fool better still: he sets up a silk factory.'
'Well, but you have factories too,' observed Platonov.
'But who set them up? They started themselves: the wool accumulated and I had nowhere to get rid of it, so I began weaving cloth, and stout plain cloth too; it is bought freely at my market here at a low price. The refuse from fish was flung on my bank for six years together; well, what was I to do with it? I began making glue of it and get forty thousand for it. Everything is like that with me, you know.'
'What a devil!' thought Tchitchikov, looking him full in the face. 'What a paw for raking in the roubles!'
'And I don't build edifices for it; I have no grand buildings with columns and façades. I don't send abroad for workmen, and I don't
