“And here’s a third point for you, Lichonin.  You prompted it yourself.  They lie most of all when they are asked:  ’How did you come to such a life?’ But what right have you to ask her about that, may the devil take you!  For she does not push her way into your intimate life?  She doesn’t interest herself with your first, ‘holy’ love or the virtue of your sisters and your bride.  Aha!  You pay money?  Splendid!  The bawd and the bouncer, and the police, and medicine, and the city government, watch over your interests.  Polite and seemly conduct on the part of the prostitute hired by you for love is guaranteed you, and your personality is immune ... even though in the most direct sense, in the sense of a slap in the face, which you, of course, deserve through your aimless, and perhaps tormenting interrogations.  But you desire truth as well for your money?  Well, that you are never to discount and to control.  They will tell you just such a conventionalized history as you—­yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian—­will digest easiest of all.  Because by itself life is either exceedingly humdrum and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly improbable as only life can be improbable.  And so you have the eternal mediocre history about an officer, about a shop clerk, about a baby and a superannuated father, who there, in the provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores her to return home.  But mark you, Lichonin, all that I’m saying doesn’t apply to you; in you, upon my word of honour, I sense a sincere and great soul ...  Let’s drink to your health?”

They drank.

“Shall I speak on?” continued Platonov undecidedly.

“Are you bored?”

“No, no, I beg of you, speak on.”

“They also lie, and lie especially innocently, to those who preen themselves before them on political hobby horses.  Here they agree with anything you want.  I shall tell her to-day:  Away with the modern bourgeois order!  Let us destroy with bombs and daggers the capitalists, landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy!  She’ll warmly agree with me.  But to-morrow the hanger-on Nozdrunov will yell that it’s necessary to string up all the socialists, to beat up all the students and massacre all the sheenies, who partake of communion in Christian blood.  And she’ll gleefully agree with him as well.  But if in addition to that you’ll also inflame her imagination, make her fall in love with yourself, then she’ll go with you everywhere you may wish—­on a pogrom, on a barricade, on a theft, on a murder.  But then, children also are yielding.  And they, by God, are children, my dear Lichonin...