At Ilya's question he looked astonished, as though he hardly understood, and said: "Eh? I don't know. That is, once I heard him speaking to your uncle about it; something about your passing false money; but he only said it chaffing." "How do you know he was only chaffing?" "Why, what a thing to say--false money," he interrupted Ilya with a gesture as though to wave the subject away. "But won't you talk to me? No time?" "About your book?" "Yes, there's a bit in it I've just read. Oh! well!" And the philosopher made a face as though something had scalded him. Ilya looked at his friend as at a person half idiotic. Sometimes Jakov seemed to him absolutely blind. He took him for an unlucky man, unfit to cope with life. The gossip ran in the house, and it was all over the street already, that Petrusha was going to marry his mistress, who kept a public house in the town. But Jakov paid absolutely no attention. When Ilya asked him when the wedding was to be, he said: "Whose wedding?" "Why, your father's." "Oh! who's to know? disgusting! A pretty witch he's chosen!" "Do you know she has a son--a big boy, who goes to the High School?" "No, I didn't know. Why?" "He'll come in for your father's property." "Oh!" said Jakov, indifferently, then with a sudden interest, "A son, you say?" "Yes." "A son--that'll just do, father can stick him behind the bar, and I can do what I like. That'll suit me." And he smacked his lips as with a foretaste of his longed-for freedom. Ilya looked at him with pity, then said, mockingly: "The proverb is right, 'Give the stupid child a piece of bread if he wants a carrot.' You! I can't imagine how you're going to live." Jakov pricked up his ears, looked at Ilya with big eyes starting out of his head, then said in a hurried whisper: "I know how I shall live! I've thought about it! Before everything, one must get one's soul in order; must understand what God wants one to do. Now I see one thing; the ways of men are all confused, like tangled threads, and they are drawn in different directions, and no one knows what to hold to or where to let himself be drawn. Now a man is born--no one knows why--and lives--I don't know why--and death comes and blows out the light. Before anything else I must know what I'm in the world for, mustn't I?" "You--you've tied yourself up in your cobwebs," said. Ilya with some heat. "I'd like to know what's the sense of that?" He felt that Jakov's dark sayings gripped his heart more strongly than of old, and waked very strange thoughts in him. He felt as though there were a being in his mind, the same that always opposed his clear, simple conception of a clean, comfortable life, that listened to Jakov with strange curiosity, and moved in his soul like a child in the mother's womb. This troubled Ilya, confused him, and seemed to him undesirable, and therefore he avoided conversation with Jakov; but it was not easy to get rid of him once he had begun.