“Now, for the first time, I have leisure to think out how to improve the lot of all humanity. Out of the crocodile shall come forth light and truth. I shall now invent a new theory, all my own, of new economic relations—a theory of which I can be proud. Up till now my time has been occupied with the service and with the frivolous amusements of the world. Now I shall overthrow everything and become a new Fourier. But to the point. Where is my wife?” I told him how I had left Elyòna Ivànovna; but he did not even hear me out. “I build great hopes upon her,” he said. “From next week she must begin to throw open her drawing-room every evening. I feel sure that the keeper will sometimes bring me, together with the crocodile, into my wife’s brilliant salon. I will stand, in my tank, in the splendid reception-room and shower around me witty sayings, which I will think out beforehand, in the mornings. I will confide my projects to statesmen, with poets I will speak of verse, with the ladies I will be amusing and fascinating (though strictly moral), and I shall have the advantage of being quite innocuous for their husbands. To the rest of society I will serve as an example of submission to fate and to the will of Providence.” I confess that, though all this was something in Ivan Matvyèich’s usual style, it came into my head that he was feverish and light-headed. This was the ordinary, every day Ivan Matvyèich twenty times magnified. “My friend,” I asked him, “do you hope for a long life? Tell me about yourself: are you well? How do you eat, sleep and breathe? I am your friend, and indeed you must acknowledge that the case is altogether supernatural, therefore my curiosity is altogether natural.” “Idle curiosity and nothing more,” he answered, sententiously; “but you shall be satisfied. You ask: How am I domiciled in the entrails of the monster? In the first place, the crocodile, to my great surprise, turns out to be completely hollow. Its interior consists of what appears to be an enormous empty sack, made of gutta-percha. If it were not so, think yourself, how could I find room in it?” “Is it possible?” I exclaimed in utter stupefaction. “Can the crocodile really be quite empty?” “Quite,” severely and dogmatically affirmed Ivan Matvyèich. “In all probability it is so constructed in accordance with the laws of Nature herself. The crocodile has only jaws, furnished with sharp teeth, and, in addition to the jaws, a rather long tail; and in reality that is all. In the middle, between these two extremities, is an empty space, enclosed in something which resembles indiarubber, and which, in all probability, is indiarubber.” “But the ribs, the stomach, the intestines, the liver, the heart?” I interrupted almost crossly.