In a short time Porfiry had completely lost all habits of sociability. He no longer paid any attention to the confusion that had come into his existence. He demanded nothing better of life than to be left alone in his last refuge, his study. He had lost all his former ways of cavilling with and pestering those about him, and he was timorous and glumly meek. All ties between him and reality were cut. To hear nothing, to see nothing, that was his heart's desire. The behavior of Yevpraksia and the servants no longer concerned him. Formerly, had the clerk allowed himself the least inaccuracy in presenting his reports on the various branches of the household management, he would have talked him to death. Now at times the reports were weeks late, and he was unresentful except when he needed some data for his fantastic computations. But when alone in his study he felt himself absolute master, free to give himself over nonchalantly to inane musings. Both of his brothers had died from drink. He, too, fell into the clutches of drunkenness. But his intoxication was mental. Shut up in his study, he racked his brains from early morning till far into the night over fantastic problems. He elaborated various fabulous schemes, made speeches before imaginary audiences, and wove whole scenes about the first person that crossed his mind. In this wild maze of fantastic acts and images a morbid passion for gain played the most important part. Porfiry Vladimirych had always had a strong leaning toward the petty annoyance of people and litigation, but because of his lack of practicality he had derived no direct profit from it. Sometimes he was even the first to suffer. This proclivity of his was now transferred to a world of abstractions and phantoms, where there was no scope for resistance on the part of the oppressed and no need for self-justification. The dividing line between the weak and the powerful vanished. In that world there were no police or justices of the peace, or rather, there were, but they existed solely for the purpose of protecting his own interests. On this fantastic plane he could freely enmesh the whole universe in his net of intriguing, cavilling, and petty oppression. He loved to torment people, ruin them, make them unhappy, suck their blood--at least, in his imagination. He would look over the various branches of his establishment and on each build up a fantastic structure of all manner of oppression and plunder--a veritable paradise, but the foulest ever conceived by a landed proprietor. And everything depended here on overpayments and underpayments assumed arbitrarily, each overpaid or underpaid kopek served as a pretext for remodelling the entire edifice, which thus passed through endless changes.