At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over:  “They are alive!  Alive!  My God, those women are alive!”

He encouraged his imagination in all sorts of ways to picture himself the brother of a fallen woman, or her father; then a fallen woman herself, with her painted cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.

It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs, and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his own personal problem.  He made an immense effort, repressed his despair, and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking how one could save all the women he had seen that day.  The method for attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well known to him.  And, however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that method.  He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and for a quarter of an hour he paced from one end of the room to the other trying to remember all the methods practiced at the present time for saving women.  He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived in lodgings in Petersburg....  Among them were a good many honest and self-sacrificing men.  Some of them had attempted to save women....

“All these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be divided into three groups.  Some, after buying the woman out of the brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she became a semptress.  And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as though she were a thing.  And the fallen woman remained a fallen woman.  Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preaching at her and giving her books.  The woman lived and sewed as long as it was interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving men on the sly, or ran away and went back where she could sleep till three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners.  The third class, the most ardent and self-sacrificing, had taken a bold, resolute step.  They had married them.  And when the insolent and spoilt, or stupid and crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside down, so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife and the mother.  Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means.”

“But it is impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed.  “I, to begin with, could not marry one!  To do that one must be a saint and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion.  But supposing that I, the medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry them—­suppose they were all married.  What would be the result?  The result would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some Smolensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw....  And what is one to do with the hundred thousand in London?  What’s one to do with those in Hamburg?”