that sort, none are a match for the gentry. They accumulate great capitals. I hinted at that just now, when you were pleased to take offence at it. But I was thinking of regular industrial enterprises. I say regular, because founding private taverns and petty truck-shops and lending the peasants wheat or money at a hundred and a hundred and fifty per cent, as so many of our landowning gentry are doing now—operations like that I can't regard as genuine commercial business.'
Kallomyetsev made no reply. He belonged to just that new species of money-lending land-owner whom Markelov had referred to in his last talk with Nezhdanov, and he was the more inhuman in his extortions that he never had any personal dealings with the peasants; he did not admit them into his perfumed European study, but did business with them through an agent. As he listened to Solomin's deliberate, as it were, impartial speech, he was raging inwardly . . . but he was silent this time, and only the working of the muscles of his face betrayed what was passing within him.
'But, Vassily Fedotitch, allow me—allow me,' began Sipyagin. 'All that you are expressing was a perfectly just criticism in former days, when the nobility enjoyed . . . totally different privileges, and were altogether in
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