She was one of the two daughters of a Penza landowner who had once been very rich but had lost all his money.

‘One evening after we’d been out boating and were going home together in the moonlight, I sat beside her and admired her curls and her shapely figure, hugged by the tight silk of the stockinet dress she was wearing. I suddenly decided that she was the one. That evening it seemed to me that she understood everything, all I was thinking and feeling, and that all my thoughts and feelings were of the most exalted kind. All it really was was that silk stockinet happened to suit her particularly well, as did curls, and that after a day spent close to her I wanted to get even closer.

‘It’s really quite remarkable how complete the illusion is that beauty is the same as goodness. A pretty woman may say the most stupid things, yet you listen, and you don’t notice the stupidities, it all sounds so intelligent. She says and does things that are infamous, yet to you they seem delightful. And when at last she says something that is neither stupid nor infamous, as long as she’s pretty, you’re immediately convinced that she’s quite wonderfully intelligent and of the very highest morality.

‘I returned home positively beside myself with enthusiasm and decided that she was the acme of moral perfection and consequently worthy of being my wife. I proposed to her the very next day.

‘What a tangled mess it all is! Out of a thousand men who get married, not only in our own class but also, regrettably, among the common people as well, there’s scarcely one who hasn’t already been married ten times, if not a hundred or even a thousand times, like Don Juan, before his marriage. (Nowadays there are, it’s true, as I’ve heard and observed, pure young men who know and sense that this is no laughing-matter, but a great and serious undertaking. May God give them strength! In my day there wasn’t one chap in ten thousand like that.) And everyone knows this, yet pretends not to. In novels the hero’s emotions are described in detail, just like the ponds and bushes he walks beside; but while they describe his grand amour for some young girl or other, they say nothing about what has taken place in the life of this interesting hero previously: there’s not a word about his visits to brothels, about the chamber-maids, the kitchen-maids, the wives of other men. Even if indecent novels of this type do exist, they’re certainly not put into the hands of those who most need to know all this – young girls. At first we pretend to them that this debauchery, which fills up the lives of half the inhabitants of our towns and villages, doesn’t exist at all. Subsequently we grow so accustomed to this pretence that we end up like the English, secure in the honest conviction that we are all of the very highest morality and that we live in a world that is morally perfect. The poor girls take it all very seriously. I know my own wretched wife did. I remember that after we’d got engaged I let her read my diary,5 so she could get some idea of the sort of life I’d been leading previously and in particular some knowledge of my last affair, which she might have found out about from other people and which I therefore considered it necessary to tell her about. I remember her horror, despair and perplexity when she learned about it and the whole thing dawned on her. I could see she was thinking of leaving me. If only she had!’

He made his sound, fell silent, and took another mouthful of tea.

VI

‘No, all the same, it’s better the way it turned out, better the way it turned out!’ he cried suddenly. ‘It served me right! But that’s all in the past now. What I was trying to say was that it’s only the poor girls who are deceived. Their mothers know, especially the ones who’ve been “educated” by their husbands, they know perfectly well what goes on. And although they pretend to believe that men are pure, their actual behaviour is altogether different. They know the right bait to use in order to catch men, both for themselves and for their daughters.

‘It’s only we men who don’t know, and we don’t know because we don’t want to know. Women know perfectly well that the most elevated love – the most “poetic”, as we call it – depends not on moral qualities but on physical proximity and also on things like hair-style, or the colour and the cut of a dress. Ask any experienced coquette who has set herself the task of ensnaring the attentions of a man which she would rather risk: to be accused of lying, cruelty and even of whorish behaviour in the presence of the man she is trying to attract, or to appear before his gaze in an ugly, badly made dress – and she will always choose the former. She knows that our man’s lying when he goes on about lofty emotions – all he wants is her body, and so he will willingly forgive her the most outrageous behaviour. What he won’t forgive, however, is an outfit that is ugly, tasteless or lacking in style. A coquette’s knowledge of this is a conscious one; but every innocent young girl knows it unconsciously, as animals do.

‘That’s the reason for those insufferable stockinets, those fake posteriors, those bare shoulders, arms – breasts, almost.