“What the devil kind of an anarchist am I!  Well, yes, I am an anarchist, because my reason, when I think of life, always leads me logically to the anarchistic beginning.  And I myself think in theory:  let men beat, deceive, and fleece men, like flocks of sheep—­let them!—­violence will breed rancour sooner or later.  Let them violate the child, let them trample creative thought under foot, let there be slavery, let there be prostitution, let them thieve, mock, spill blood...Let them!  The worse, the better, the nearer the end.  There is a great law, I think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all the tremendous and many-millioned human life:  the power of effort is equal to the power of resistance.  The worse, the better.  Let evil and vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a monstrous abscess—­an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere.  For it will burst some time!  And let there be terror and insufferable pain.  Let the pus deluge all the universe.  But mankind will either choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be regenerated to a new, beautiful life.”

Lichonin avidly drank off a cup of cold black coffee and continued vehemently: 

“Yes.  Just so do I and many others theorize, sitting in our rooms, over tea with white bread and cooked sausage, when the value of each separate human life is so-so, an infinitesimally small numeral in a mathematical formula.  But let me see a child abused, and the red blood will rush to my head from rage.  And when I look and look upon the labour of a moujik or a labourer, I am thrown into hysterics for shame at my algebraic calculations.  There is—­ the devil take it!—­there is something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is stronger than human reason.  Take to-day, now ...  Why do I feel at this minute as though I had robbed a sleeping man or deceived a three-year-old child, or hit a bound person?  And why does it seem to me to-day that I myself am guilty of the evil of prostitution—­guilty in my silence, my indifference, my indirect permission?  What am I to do, Platonov!” exclaimed the student with grief in his voice.

Platonov kept silent, squinting at him with his little narrow eyes.  But Jennie unexpectedly said in a caustic tone: 

“Well, you do as one Englishwoman did ...  A certain red-haired clodhopper came to us here.  She must have been important, because she came with a whole retinue ... all some sort of officials ...  But before her had come the assistant of the commissioner, with the precinct inspector Kerbesh.  And the assistant directly forewarned us, just like that:  ’If you stiffs, and so on and so on, will let out even one little rude word, or something, then I won’t leave one stone upon another of your establishment, while I’ll flog all the wenches soundly in the station-house and make ‘em rot in jail!’ Well, at last this galoot came.  She gibbered and she gibbered something in a foreign language, all the time pointed to heaven with her hand, and then distributed a five-kopeck Testament to every one of us and rode away.  Now you ought to do the same, dearie.”