“It’s horrible!” he said, draining a glass of wine and shaking his head.  “I am told that in every introductory lecture on women’s diseases the medical students are admonished to remember that each one of them has a mother, a sister, a fiancee, before undressing and examining a female patient. . . .  That advice would be very good not only for medical students but for everyone who in one way or another has to deal with a woman’s life.  Now that I have a wife and a little daughter, oh, how well I understand that advice!  How I understand it, my God!  You may as well hear the rest, though. . . .  As soon as she had become my mistress, Kisotchka’s view of the position was very different from mine.  First of all she felt for me a deep and passionate love.  What was for me an ordinary amatory episode was for her an absolute revolution in her life.  I remember, it seemed to me that she had gone out of her mind.  Happy for the first time in her life, looking five years younger, with an inspired enthusiastic face, not knowing what to do with herself for happiness, she laughed and cried and never ceased dreaming aloud how next day we would set off for the Caucasus, then in the autumn to Petersburg; how we would live afterwards.

“‘Don’t worry yourself about my husband,’ she said to reassure me.  ’He is bound to give me a divorce.  Everyone in the town knows that he is living with the elder Kostovitch.  We will get a divorce and be married.’

“When women love they become acclimatised and at home with people very quickly, like cats.  Kisotchka had only spent an hour and a half in my room when she already felt as though she were at home and was ready to treat my property as though it were her own.  She packed my things in my portmanteau, scolded me for not hanging my new expensive overcoat on a peg instead of flinging it on a chair, and so on.

“I looked at her, listened, and felt weariness and vexation.  I was conscious of a slight twinge of horror at the thought that a respectable, honest, and unhappy woman had so easily, after some three or four hours, succumbed to the first man she met.  As a respectable man, you see, I didn’t like it.  Then, too, I was unpleasantly impressed by the fact that women of Kisotchka’s sort, not deep or serious, are too much in love with life, and exalt what is in reality such a trifle as love for a man to the level of bliss, misery, a complete revolution in life. . . .  Moreover, now that I was satisfied, I was vexed with myself for having been so stupid as to get entangled with a woman whom I should have to deceive.  And in spite of my disorderly life I must observe that I could not bear telling lies.

“I remember that Kisotchka sat down at my feet, laid her head on my knees, and, looking at me with shining, loving eyes, asked: 

“‘Kolya, do you love me?  Very, very much?’

“And she laughed with happiness. . . .  This struck me as sentimental, affected, and not clever; and meanwhile I was already inclined to look for ‘depth of thought’ before everything.