seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably
contracted downward, toward the bridge of the nose.

"I'll put out the candles," said Lichonin.

The morning half-light, watery and drowsy, filled the room through the
slits of the blinds. The extinguished wicks of the candles smoked with
faint streams. The tobacco smoke swirled in blue, layered shrouds, but
a ray of sunlight that had cut its way through the heart-shaped hollow
in a window shutter, transpierced the cabinet obliquely with a joyous,
golden sword of dust, and in liquid, hot gold splashed upon the paper
on the wall.

"That's better," said Lichonin, sitting down. "The conversation will be
short, but ... the devil knows ... how to approach it."

He looked at Jennie in abstraction.

"Shall I go away, then?" said she indifferently.

"No, you sit a while," the reporter answered for Lichonin. "She won't
be in the way," he turned to the student and slightly smiled. "For the
conversation will be about prostitution? Isn't that so?"

"Well, yes... sort of..."

"Very well, then. You listen to her carefully. Her opinions happen to
be of an unusually cynical nature, but at times of exceeding weight."

Lichonin vigorously rubbed and kneaded his face with his palms, then
intertwined his fingers and nervously cracked them twice. It was
apparent that he was agitated and was himself constrained about that
which he was getting ready to say.

"Oh, but isn't it all the same!" he suddenly exclaimed angrily. "You
were to-day speaking about these women ... I listened... True, you
haven't told me anything new. But-strangely-I, for some reason, as
though for the first time in my loose life, have looked upon this
question with open eyes... I ask you, what is prostitution in the end?
What is it? The extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal
historical phenomenon? Will it cease some time? Or will it die only
with the death of all mankind? Who will answer me that?"

Platonov was looking at him intently, narrowing his eyes slightly,
through habit. He wanted to know what main thought was inflicting such
sincere torture on Lichonin.

"When it will cease, none will tell you. Perhaps when the magnificent
Utopias of the socialists and anarchists will materialize, when the
world will become everyone's and no one's, when love will be absolutely
free and subject only to its own unlimited desires, while mankind will
fuse into one happy family, wherein will perish th