Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/956

 for household expenses, and for the payment of unavoidable debts. There was absolutely no money to be had.

It was disagreeable and awkward, and Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that it ought not to be continued. The reason of it, in his opinion, lay in the fact that he got too small a salary. The place which he held had been very good five years before, but it was so no longer. Petrof, the director of a bank, got twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a member of the Council, got seventeen thousand; Mitin, the head of a bank, got fifty thousand.

"Apparently I have been asleep, and they have forgotten me," said Stepan Arkadyevitch to himself; and he began to keep his eyes and ears open; and at the end of the winter he discovered a very good place, and matured his attack upon it, beginning at Moscow through his uncles, his aunts, and his friends, and then, when the time seemed ripe in the spring, he himself went down to Petersburg.

It was one of those lucrative sinecure places which nowadays are found, varying in importance, worth any where from 1000 to 50,000 rubles a year. This place was in the Commission of the Consolidated Agency for the Mutual Credit-Balance of the Southern Railway and Banking Establishments. This place, like all such places, required at once such varied talents and such extraordinary activity, that it was hard to find them united in one person; but since it was hopeless to find any one with all these qualities, it was certainly better that the man put in should be an honest rather than a dishonest man.

Now Stepan Arkadyevitch was an honest man in every sense of the term; for in Moscow the word chestnui, meaning honest, has two significations, depending on its accent. They speak of an honest agent, an honest writer, an honest journal, an honest institution; and it means not only that men or institutions are not dishonest, but that they know how to adapt themselves to circumstances. Stepan Arkadyevitch belonged in Moscow to that class of people who used that convenient word; and, as he passed for honest, he therefore felt that he had a better right than any one else to that place.