All this was so clear to him now that he could not cease wondering how it was that people could not see it; that he himself could not see that which is so patent. It was perfectly clear that children and old people were dying for want of milk, and they had no milk because they had not land enough to feed the cattle and also raise bread and hay. And he devised a scheme by which he was to give the land to the people, and they were to pay an annual rent which was to go to the community, to be used for common utilities and taxes. This was not the single-tax, but it was the nearest approach to it under present conditions. The important part consisted in that he renounced his right to own land. When he returned to the house, the clerk, with a particularly happy smile on his face, offered him dinner, expressing his fear that it might spoil. The table was covered with a gloomy cloth, an embroidered towel serving as a napkin, and on the table, in vieux-saxe, stood a soup-bowl with a broken handle, filled with potato soup and containing the same rooster that he had seen carried into the house on his arrival. After the soup came the same rooster, fried with feathers, and cakes made of cheese-curds, bountifully covered with butter and sugar. Although the taste of it all was poor, Nekhludoff kept on eating, being absorbed in the thoughts which relieved him of the sadness that oppressed him on his return from the village. After dinner Nekhludoff with difficulty seated the superserviceable clerk, and in order to make sure of himself and at the same time to confide to some one the thoughts uppermost in his mind, told him of his project and asked his opinion. The clerk smiled, as though he had been thinking of the same thing, and was very glad to hear it, but in reality did not understand it, not because Nekhludoff did not express himself plainly enough, but because, according to this project, Nekhludoff deprived himself of advantages for the benefit of others, whereas the truth that every man strives to obtain advantages at the expense of others, was so firmly rooted in the clerk's mind, that he thought that he misunderstood Nekhludoff when the latter said that the entire income of the land was to go into the community's treasury. "I understand. So you will draw the interest on the capital?" he said, becoming radiant. "No, no. I transfer the land to them entirely." "In that case you will get no income?" asked the clerk and he ceased to smile. "I relinquish that." The clerk sighed deeply, then began to smile again. Now he understood. He understood that Nekhludoff's mind was not entirely sound, and he immediately tried to find a way of profiting by Nekhludoff's project, and endeavored to so construe it that he might turn it to his own advantage.