Then, rubbing his face in his hands, he began: ‘If I’m going to tell you, I’ll have to start at the beginning, and tell you how and why I got married, and what I was like before my marriage.

‘Before my marriage I lived the sort of life all men do, in our social circle, that is. I’m a landowner, I’ve got a university degree, and I used to be a marshal of nobility. As I say, I lived the sort of life all men do – a life of debauchery. And, like all the men of our class, I thought that this debauched existence was perfectly proper. I considered myself a charming young man, a thoroughly moral sort of fellow. I wasn’t a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, and didn’t make debauchery into my main aim in life, as many young men of my age did, but indulged in it with decency and moderation, for the sake of my health. I avoided women who might have succeeded in tying me down by having babies or forming attachments to me. Actually, there probably were both babies and attachments, but I behaved as if there weren’t. Not only did I regard this as moral behaviour – I was proud of it.’

He paused and made his sound, as he apparently did whenever some new idea occurred to him.

‘And that’s the really loathsome thing about it,’ he exclaimed. ‘Debauchery isn’t something physical. Not even the most outrageous physicality can be equated with debauchery. Debauchery – real debauchery – takes place when you free yourself from any moral regard for the woman you enter into physical relations with. But you see, I made the acquisition of that freedom into a matter of personal honour. I remember the agony of mind I once went through when I was in too much of a hurry to remember to pay a woman who had probably fallen in love with me and had let me go to bed with her. I just couldn’t rest easy until I’d sent her the money, thereby demonstrating that I didn’t consider myself morally obliged towards her in any way. Don’t sit there nodding your head as if you agreed with me!’ he suddenly shouted at me. ‘I know what you’re thinking! You’re all the same, you too, unless you’re a rare exception, you see things the way I did then. Oh I say, forget that, I’m sorry,’ he continued. ‘But the fact is that it’s horrible, horrible, horrible!’

‘What is?’ I inquired.

‘The abyss of error we live in regarding women and our relations with them. It’s no good, I just can’t talk calmly about it. It’s not merely because of that episode, as the other gentleman called it, but because ever since I went through it my eyes have been opened and I’ve seen everything in a completely new light. Everything’s been turned inside out, it’s all inside out!…’

He lit a cigarette and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, began to tell me his story.

It was so dark that I could not see his face, only hear his forceful, pleasant voice raised above the rattling and swaying of the carriage.

IV

‘Yes, it was only after the suffering I endured, only thanks to it that I came to understand what the root of the trouble was, saw the way things ought to be, and thus obtained an insight into the horror of things the way they were.

‘If you want to know, this is how and when it all began, the sequence of events that led up to that episode of mine. It started shortly before my sixteenth birthday. I was still at grammar school then. My older brother was a first-year student at university. As yet I had no experience of women, but like all the wretched boys of our social class I was no longer innocent. For more than a year I’d been exposed to the corrupting influence of the other boys. Woman – not any woman in particular but woman as a sweet, ineffable presence – woman, any woman, the nakedness of woman already tormented me. The hours I spent alone were not pure ones. I suffered in the way ninety-nine per cent of our youngsters suffer.