“Just as you wish, my dear fellow; if my method displeases you or Liubka, then I’m even ready to resign.  My problem consists only of bringing in a genuine element of discipline into her education.  If she does not understand anything, then I compel her to learn it by heart, aloud.  With time this will cease.  That is unavoidable.  Recall, Lichonin, how difficult the transition from arithmetic to algebra was for us, when we were compelled to replace common numerals with letters, and did not know why this was done.  Or why did they teach us grammar, instead of simply advising us to write tales and verses?”

And on the very next day, bending down low under the hanging shade of the lamp over Liubka’s body, and sniffing all over her breast and under her arm pits, he was saying to her: 

“Draw a triangle...  Well, yes, this way and this way.  On top I write ‘Love.’  Write simply the letter L, and below M and W. That will be:  the Love of Man and Woman.”

With the air of an oracle, unshakable and austere, he spoke all sorts of erotic balderdash and almost unexpectedly concluded: 

“And so look, Liuba.  The desire to love—­it’s the same as the desire to eat, to drink, and to breathe the air.”  He would squeeze her thigh hard, considerably above the knee; and she again, becoming confused and not wishing to offend him, would try almost imperceptibly to move her leg away gradually.

“Tell me, would it be offensive, now, for your sister, mother, or for your husband, that you by chance had not dined at home, but had gone into a restaurant or a cook-shop, and had there satisfied your hunger?  And so with love.  No more, no less.  A physiological enjoyment.  Perhaps more powerful, more keen, than all others, but that’s all.  Thus, for example, now:  I want you as a woman.  While you ...”

“Oh, drop it, Mister,” Liubka cut him short with vexation.  “Well, what are you harping on one and the same thing for all the time?  Change your act.  You’ve been told:  no and no.  Don’t you think I see what you’re trying to get at?  But only I’ll never agree to unfaithfulness, seeing as how Vasilli Vasillievich is my benefactor, and I adore him with all my soul...  And you’re even pretty disgusting to me with your nonsense.”

Once he caused Liubka a great and scandalous hurt, and all because of his theoretical first principles.  As at the university they were already for a long time talking about Lichonin’s having saved a girl from such and such a house; and that now he is taken up with her moral regeneration; that rumour, naturally, also reached the studying girls, who frequented the student circles.  And so, none other than Simanovsky once brought to Liubka two female medicos, one historian, and one beginning poetess, who, by the way, was already writing critical essays as well.  He introduced them in the most serious and fool-like manner.

“Here,” he said, stretching out his hand, now in the direction of the guests, now of Liubka, “here, comrades, get acquainted.  You, Liuba, will find in them real friends, who will help you on your radiant path; while you—­comrades, Liza, Nadya, Sasha and Rachel—­ you will regard as elder sisters a being who has just struggled out of that horrible darkness into which the social structure places the modern woman.”