ly salary.

And it was just here--at Anna Markovna's--that he had come to know
woman for the first time--the very same Jennka.

The fall of innocent souls in houses of ill-fame, or with street
solitaries, is fulfilled far more frequently than it is usually
thought. When not green youths only, but even honourable men of fifty,
almost grandfathers, are interrogated about this ticklish matter, they
will tell you, sure enough, the ancient stencilled lie of how they had
been seduced by a chambermaid or a governess. But this is one of those
lingering, queer lies, going back into the depth of past decades, which
are almost never noticed by a single one of the professional observers,
and in any case are not described by any one.

If each one of us will try, to put it pompously, to put his hand on his
heart, then every one will catch himself in the fact, that having once
in childhood said some sort of boastful or touching fiction, which had
success, and having repeated it for that reason two and five and ten
times more--he afterwards cannot get rid of it all his life, and
repeats with entire firmness by now a history which had never been; a
firmness such that in the very end he believes the story. With time
Kolya also narrated to his comrades how his aunt once removed, a young
woman of the world had seduced him. It must be said, however, that the
intimate proximity to this lady--a large, dark-eyed, white faced,
sweetly fragrant southern woman--did really exist; but existed only in
Kolya's imagination, in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary
sexual enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all
men, then ninety-nine, in any case.

Having experienced mechanical sexual excitements very early,
approximately since nine or nine years and a half, Kolya did not at all
have the least understanding of the significance of that end of being
in love or of courtship, which is so horrible on the face of it, if it
be looked at impartially, or if it be explained scientifically.
Unfortunately, there was at that time near him not a one of the present
progressive and learned ladies who, having turned away the neck of the
classic stork, and torn up by the roots the cabbage underneath which
children are found, recommend that the great mystery of love and
generation be explained to children in lectures, through comparisons
and assimilations, mercilessly and in a well-nigh graphic manner.

It must be said, that at that r