'The system's all right,' answered Solomin, 'but can it give any return? I doubt it.'
Not Sipyagin only, but even Kallomyetsev, felt that Solomin was, as it were, at home in the factory, that everything in it was thoroughly familiar to him and understood to the smallest detail—that here he was master. He laid his hand on a machine as a driver lays his hand on a horse's neck; he poked his fingers into a wheel and it stopped moving or began going round; he scooped up in his hand out of the vat a little of the pulp of which the paper was made, and at once it revealed all its defects. Solomin said little, and did not even look at the Little Russian at all; in silence, too, he walked out of the factory. Sipyagin and Kallomyetsev followed him.
Sipyagin did not tell any one to accompany him . . . he positively stamped and gnashed his teeth. He was very much disturbed.
'I see by your face,' he said, addressing Solomin, 'that you're not pleased with my factory, and I know myself that it's in an unsatisfactory state and unprofitable; however, . . . please don't scruple to speak out . . . what are really its most important shortcomings? And what is to be done to improve it?'
'Paper-making's not in my line,' answered
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