Women, especially women who’ve undergone the “education” provided by men, know very well that all talk about higher things is just talk, that all a man really wants is her body, and all the things that show it off in the most enticing fashion possible. And that’s what they give him. You know, if only one is able to kick the habit of all this squalor that’s become second nature to us and takes a look at the life of our upper classes as it really is in all its shamelessness, one can see that what we live in is a sort of licensed brothel. Don’t you agree? I can prove it to you if you like,’ he said, not letting me get a word in. ‘You may say that women of our class act out of interests that are different from those of the women in the whorehouses, but I say that the contrary is true, and I can prove it. If people differ as regards the purpose, the inner content of their lives, that difference will inevitably be reflected in outward things, and those will differ, too. But look at those poor despised wretches, and then cast a glance at our society ladies: the same exposure of arms, shoulders, breasts, the same flaunted, tightly clad posteriors, the same passion for precious stones and shiny, expensive objects, the same diversions – music, dancing, singing. Just as the former seek to entice men by all the means at their disposal, so do the latter. There’s no difference. At a rule, we may say that while short-term prostitutes are generally looked down upon, long-term prostitutes are treated with respect.’

VII

‘Yes, and so I fell into the trap of all those stockinets, those curls and fake bottoms. I was an easy catch, because I’d been brought up under those special conditions created for amorous young people, who are cultivated in them like cucumbers in a greenhouse. Yes, the stimulating, superabundant food we eat, together with our complete physical idleness, amounts to nothing but a systematic arousal of lust. I don’t know whether you find that astonishing or not, but it’s a fact. I myself had no idea of all this until quite recently. But now I can see it. And that is what I find so infuriating, that no one has any idea of what’s really going on, and everyone says such stupid things, like that woman just now.

‘Yes, this spring there were some peasants working on the railway embankment close to where I live. The normal food of a young peasant is bread, kvas and onions; it keeps him lively, cheerful and healthy; he works at light tasks out in the fields. He goes to work for the railway, and is fed on kasha and a pound of meat a day. But that day involves sixteen hours of labour, during which he has to trundle a wheelbarrow weighing some thirty pounds, and he soon uses up the meat. It’s just right for him. But look at us: every day each of us eats perhaps two pounds of meat, game and all kinds of stimulating food and drink. Where does it all go? On sensual excesses. If we really do use it up in that way, the safety valve is opened and everything is all right. If, on the other hand, we close the safety valve, as I did mine from time to time, there immediately results a state of physical arousal which, channelled through the prism of our artificial way of life, expresses itself as the purest form of love, sometimes even as a platonic infatuation. I, too, fell in love that way, like everyone else. And it was all there: all the ecstasy, the tender emotion, the poetry. In actual fact, this love of mine was the product of, on the one hand, the efforts of the girl’s mother and dress-makers, and on the other, of the excessive quantities of food I had consumed during a life of idleness. If, on the one hand, there had been none of those boat trips, those dress-makers with their waistlines, and so on, and say my wife had gone around in an ill-fitting housecoat and spent her time at home, and if, on the other hand, I had been living the normal life of a man who consumes just as much food as is necessary for him to be able to do his work, and the safety valve had been open – it happened to be closed at the time – I would never have fallen in love and none of all this would ever have happened.’

VIII

‘Well, this time it all clicked together: my state of mind, her dress and the boat trip. And it worked. Twenty times before it hadn’t worked, but now it did – the way a trap does.