to marry the second time, partly because he preserved a genuine feeling for his wife's memory, and, moreover, because he did not want to give Kátja, whom he loved very warmly, a stepmother.
Pólozof pushed and pushed up the mountain; he would have had not three, not four millions, but ten, if he had given himself to monopolies; but he despised them, and he considered contracts and supplies the only honest business. His confreres in the millionocracy laughed at such a slight and delicate distinction, and they were not wrong; but he, though he was not in the right, kept repeating his pet phrase, "I am a commercial man, and I do not want to get rich by robbery." But a year or a year and a half before his daughter made Viéra Pavlovna's acquaintance there appeared too clear proof that there was very little difference between his trade and monopoly, as far as the facts of the matter were concerned, though there was a great difference according to his ideas. He undertook a great contract; whether it was linen, or provisions, or boot-leather, I am not sure; but as he had been becoming every year more stubborn and supercilious on account of his age and his constant success, and the increasing respect with which he was regarded, he quarrelled with an important personage, got rather angry, berated him, and the job proved to be a bad one. At the end of a week they bade him eat humble pie: he said, "I won't"; "You will collapse"; "All right, but I won't give in." In a month he was told the same thing; he made the same reply; and really, as far as eating humble pie was concerned, he ate no humble pie; but as far as collapsing went—he collapsed! His goods were rejected; moreover, whether there were actual faults, or whether it came from ill will, at all events, his three or four millions vanished. And Pólozof, at the age of seventy, found himself a beggar; that is, a beggar compared to what he had been; but still, without any comparison with what he had been, he lived well; he had some shares in a stearine factory, and without hanging down his nose, accepted the position of manager of this factory, at a good salary. Besides that, there remained, by some chance, a few tens of thousands of rubles. If such remnants of his fortune had been in his hands fifteen or ten years before, they would have been enough to help him push himself up a respectable mountain. But being over sixty, it was hard for him to push himself, and Pólozof argued that
