“If I were simply unhappy I should thank God,” he went on without looking at his listener.  “My personal unhappiness sinks into the background when I remember how often in my enthusiasms I have been absurd, far from the truth, unjust, cruel, dangerous!  How often I have hated and despised those whom I ought to have loved, and vice versa, I have changed a thousand times.  One day I believe, fall down and worship, the next I flee like a coward from the gods and friends of yesterday, and swallow in silence the ‘scoundrel!’ they hurl after me.  God alone has seen how often I have wept and bitten my pillow in shame for my enthusiasms.  Never once in my life have I intentionally lied or done evil, but my conscience is not clear!  I cannot even boast, Madam, that I have no one’s life upon my conscience, for my wife died before my eyes, worn out by my reckless activity.  Yes, my wife!  I tell you they have two ways of treating women nowadays.  Some measure women’s skulls to prove woman is inferior to man, pick out her defects to mock at her, to look original in her eyes, and to justify their sensuality.  Others do their utmost to raise women to their level, that is, force them to learn by heart the 35,000 species, to speak and write the same foolish things as they speak and write themselves.”

Liharev’s face darkened.

“I tell you that woman has been and always will be the slave of man,” he said in a bass voice, striking his fist on the table.  “She is the soft, tender wax which a man always moulds into anything he likes. . . .  My God! for the sake of some trumpery masculine enthusiasm she will cut off her hair, abandon her family, die among strangers! . . . among the ideas for which she has sacrificed herself there is not a single feminine one. . . .  An unquestioning, devoted slave!  I have not measured skulls, but I say this from hard, bitter experience:  the proudest, most independent women, if I have succeeded in communicating to them my enthusiasm, have followed me without criticism, without question, and done anything I chose; I have turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I heard afterwards, shot a gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my wanderings, and like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my changing enthusiasms.”

Liharev jumped up and walked up and down the room.

“A noble, sublime slavery!” he said, clasping his hands.  “It is just in it that the highest meaning of woman’s life lies!  Of all the fearful medley of thoughts and impressions accumulated in my brain from my association with women my memory, like a filter, has retained no ideas, no clever saying, no philosophy, nothing but that extraordinary, resignation to fate, that wonderful mercifulness, forgiveness of everything.”

Liharev clenched his fists, stared at a fixed point, and with a sort of passionate intensity, as though he were savouring each word as he uttered it, hissed through his clenched teeth: