“I must say that as a rule I was a great hand at combining my lofty ideas with the lowest prose.

“Thoughts of the darkness of the grave did not prevent me from giving busts and legs their full due.  Our dear Baron’s exalted ideas do not prevent him from going on Saturdays to Vukolovka on amatory expeditions.  To tell the honest truth, as far as I remember, my attitude to women was most insulting.  Now, when I think of that high-school girl, I blush for my thoughts then, but at the time my conscience was perfectly untroubled.  I, the son of honourable parents, a Christian, who had received a superior education, not naturally wicked or stupid, felt not the slightest uneasiness when I paid women Blutgeld, as the Germans call it, or when I followed highschool girls with insulting looks. . . .  The trouble is that youth makes its demands, and our philosophy has nothing in principle against those demands, whether they are good or whether they are loathsome.  One who knows that life is aimless and death inevitable is not interested in the struggle against nature or the conception of sin:  whether you struggle or whether you don’t, you will die and rot just the same. . . .  Secondly, my friends, our philosophy instils even into very young people what is called reasonableness.  The predominance of reason over the heart is simply overwhelming amongst us.  Direct feeling, inspiration—­everything is choked by petty analysis.  Where there is reasonableness there is coldness, and cold people—­it’s no use to disguise it—­know nothing of chastity.  That virtue is only known to those who are warm, affectionate, and capable of love.  Thirdly, our philosophy denies the significance of each individual personality.  It’s easy to see that if I deny the personality of some Natalya Stepanovna, it’s absolutely nothing to me whether she is insulted or not.  To-day one insults her dignity as a human being and pays her Blutgeld, and next day thinks no more of her.

“So I sat in the summer-house and watched the young ladies.  Another woman’s figure appeared in the avenue, with fair hair, her head uncovered and a white knitted shawl on her shoulders.  She walked along the avenue, then came into the summer-house, and taking hold of the parapet, looked indifferently below and into the distance over the sea.  As she came in she paid no attention to me, as though she did not notice me.  I scrutinised her from foot to head (not from head to foot, as one scrutinises men) and found that she was young, not more than five-and-twenty, nice-looking, with a good figure, in all probability married and belonging to the class of respectable women.  She was dressed as though she were at home, but fashionably and with taste, as ladies are, as a rule, in N.

“‘This one would do nicely,’ I thought, looking at her handsome figure and her arms; ’she is all right. . . .  She is probably the wife of some doctor or schoolmaster. . . .’