e them on political hobby horses. Here they agree with
anything you want. I shall tell her to-day: Away with the modern
bourgeois order! Let us destroy with bombs and daggers the capitalists,
landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy! She'll warmly agree with me.
But to-morrow the hanger-on Nozdrunov will yell that it's necessary to
string up all the socialists, to beat up all the students and massacre
all the sheenies, who partake of communion in Christian blood. And
she'll gleefully agree with him as well. But if in addition to that
you'll also inflame her imagination, make her fall in love with
yourself, then she'll go with you everywhere you may wish--on a pogrom,
on a barricade, on a theft, on a murder. But then, children also are
yielding. And they, by God, are children, my dear Lichonin...

"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