Page:Dostoevsky - The Idiot, Collected Edition, 1916.djvu/41

same style as the English, but the black strokes are a trifle backer and thicker than the English, and you see the proportion is spoiled. Notice, too, the oval is a trifle rounder, and the flourish is admitted, too, and a flourish is a most perilous thing! A flourish requires extraordinary taste, but if only it's successful, if symmetry is attained, the writing is so incomparable that one may simply fall in love with it."

"Oho! but you go into such niceties!" laughed the general, "You are not simply a good penman, my dear fellow, you are an artist! Eh, Ganya?"

"Marvellous," said Ganya, "and he recognises his vocation too," he added, with a sarcastic laugh.

"You may laugh, but there's a career in it," said the general. "Do you know prince, to what personage we'll get you to write now? Why, you can count on thirty-five roubles a month from the start. But it's half-past twelve," he added, glancing at the clock. "To business, prince, for I must make haste and perhaps I may not see you again to-day. Sit down for a minute. I have explained already that I cannot see you very often, but I am sincerely anxious to help you a little, a little of course, that is, in what's essential, and then for the rest you must do as you please. I'll find you a job in the office, not a difficult one, but needing accuracy. Now for the next thing. In the home, that is, the family of Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, this young friend of mine with whom I beg you to become acquainted--his mother and sister have set apart two or three furnished rooms, and let them with board and attendance to specially recommended lodgers. I am sure Nina Alexandrovna will accept my recommendation. For you it will be a godsend, prince, for you will not be alone, but, so to speak, in the bosom of a family, and to my thinking you ought not to be alone at first in such a town as Petersburg. Nina Alexandrovna and Varvara Ardalionovna, her daughter, are ladies for whom I have the greatest respect. Nina Alexandrovna is the wife of a retired general who was a comrade of mine when I was first in the service, though owing to circumstances I've broken off all relations with him. That doesn't prevent me, however, from respecting him in a certain sense. I tell you all this, prince, that you may understand that I recommend you personally, and so I make myself in a sense responsible for you. The terms are extremely moderate, and I hope that your salary will soon be quite sufficient to meet them. Of course a man wants pocket-