“At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease.  And here is all her life, surrounded and fenced off from the universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable and dead wall.  Turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary—­thirty or forty words, no more—­altogether as with a baby or a savage:  to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman—­and that’s all.  And so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile plane until her very death, exactly as in the case of a gray and naive lady teacher who has not crossed over the threshold of a female institute since she was ten, as in the case of a nun given as a child into a convent.  In a word, picture to yourself a tree of a genuinely great species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar from jam.  And precisely to this childish phase of their existence do I attribute their compulsory lying—­so innocent, purposeless and habitual ...  But then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with anything the frank truth in this business-like dickering about the price of a night; in these ten men in an evening; in these printed rules, issued by the city fathers, about the use of a solution of boric acid and about maintaining one’s self in cleanliness; in the weekly doctors’ inspections; in the nasty diseases, which are looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as simply and without suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion of these women to men—­so deep, that they all, without conception, compensate for it in the Lesbian manner and do not even in the least conceal it.  All their incongruous life is here, on the palm of my hand, with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice; but there is in it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy before people and before one’s self, which enmesh all humanity from top to bottom.  Consider, my dear Lichonin, how much nagging, drawn out, disgusting deception, how much hate, there is in any marital cohabitation in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.  How much blind, merciless cruelty—­precisely not animal, but human, reasoned, far-sighted, calculated cruelty—­there is in the sacred maternal instinct—­and behold, with what tender colours this instinct is adorned!  Then what about all these unnecessary, tom-fool professions, invented by cultured man for the safeguarding of my nest, my bit of meat, my woman, my child, these different overseers, controllers, inspectors, judges, attorneys, jailers, advocates, chiefs, bureaucrats, generals, soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of titles more.  They all subserve human greed, cowardice, viciousness, servility, legitimised sensuality, laziness-beggarliness!—­yes, that is the real word!—­human beggarliness.  But what magnificent words we have!  The altar of the fatherland, Christian compassion for our neighbor, progress, sacred duty, sacred property, holy love.  Ugh!  I do not believe in a single fine word now,