II

calamities in this magnificent capital, adorned with innumerable monuments. Here I obtained a situation.⁠ ⁠… I obtained it and I lost it again. Do you understand? This time it was through my own fault I lost it: for my weakness had come out.⁠ ⁠… We have now part of a room at Amalia Fyodorovna Lippevechsel’s; and what we live upon and what we pay our rent with, I could not say. There are a lot of people living there besides ourselves. Dirt and disorder, a perfect Bedlam⁠ ⁠… hm⁠ ⁠… yes⁠ ⁠… And meanwhile my daughter by my first wife has grown up; and what my daughter has had to put up with from her stepmother whilst she was growing up, I won’t speak of. For, though Katerina Ivanovna is full of generous feelings, she is a spirited lady, irritable and short-tempered.⁠ ⁠… Yes. But it’s no use going over that! Sonia, as you may well fancy, has had no education. I did make an effort four years ago to give her a course of geography and universal history, but as I was not very well up in those subjects myself and we had no suitable books, and what books we had⁠ ⁠… hm, anyway we have not even those now, so all our instruction came to an end. We stopped at Cyrus of Persia. Since she has attained years of maturity, she has read other books of romantic tendency and of late she had read with great interest a book she got through Mr. Lebeziatnikov, Lewes’ Physiology ⁠—do you know it?⁠—and even recounted extracts from it to us: and that’s the whole of her education. And now may I venture to address you, honoured sir, on my own account with a private question. Do you suppose that a respectable poor girl can earn much by honest work? Not fifteen farthings a day can she earn, if she is respectable and has no special talent and that without putting her work down for an instant! And what’s more, Ivan Ivanitch Klopstock the civil counsellor⁠—have you heard of him?⁠—has not to this day paid her for the half-dozen linen shirts she made him and drove her roughly away, stamping and reviling her, on the pretext that the shirt collars were not made like the pattern and were put in askew. And there are the little ones hungry.⁠ ⁠… And Katerina Ivanovna walking up and down and wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed red, as they always are