"I'll tell thee. Thou art this sort of man. Thou wouldst think nothing of casting me adrift in the wide world, I put myself wholly into thy hands, and thou mightest have robbed me as thou didst like, and I would not have prevented thee--and all this thou knewest. But thou hast repaid confidence with confidence, and I know how much of mine thou hast consumed in these days--about four thousand in all. Another in thy place," she said, "would have gobbled up the whole pot and emptied the saucer on the hearth as well." That's what she said. Well, she was a kind-hearted old thing, that I will say. I gave her a parting kiss, and with a light heart and five thousand roubles in my pocket--no doubt she had taken these also into consideration--I appeared at St. Petersburg. I lived like a baron, went to the theatre, made acquaintances, sometimes from sheer ennui played on the boards, but I played much more frequently at cards. Cards are a capital occupation. You sit down at a table, and in the course of a single night you die and rise again ten times over. It is exciting to know that within the next few moments your last roubles may dribble away, and you yourself may step down into the street a beggar, with nothing but suicide or highway robbery before you. It is also good to know that your neighbour or partner has, with reference to _his_ last rouble, exactly the same ticklish and cruelly poignant sensation as you yourself have had not so very long before him. To see red and pale excited faces, tremulous with the terror of being beaten and with the greed of gain, to look at them and win their cards away, one after the other--ah! how strangely that excites the nerves and the blood!... You win a card--and it is just as if you stole away from the man's heart a bit of warm flesh with the nerves and blood.... That's being happy if you like! This constant risk of falling is the finest thing in life, and the finest thought in life was well expressed by the poet: "Fierce contest is a rapturous bliss, E'en on the marge of the abyss." Yes, there is rapture in it, and, in general, it is only possible to feel happy when you are risking something. The more risk--the larger and fuller the life. Have you ever happened to starve? It has been my luck not to eat anything for twice twenty-four hours at a stretch.... And look you, when the belly begins to prey upon itself, when you feel your vitals drying up and dying with hunger--then, for the sake of a bit of bread, you are ready to kill a man, a child; you are ready for anything, and this capacity for crime has its own peculiar poetry, it is a very precious sensation, and, having once experienced it, you have a great respect for yourself.