to all of them,
no more foolish than all those I've met; made me over into a floor mop,
some sort of a sewer pipe for their filthy pleasures? ...Ugh! ... Is it
possible that for all of this I must take even such a disease with
gratitude as well? ... Or am I a slave? ... A dumb object? ... A pack
horse? ... And so, Platonov, it was just then that I resolved to infect
them all: young, old, poor, rich, handsome, hideous--all, all, all! ..."

Platonov, who had already long since put his plate away from him, was
looking at her with astonishment, and even more--almost with horror.
He, who had seen in life much of the painful, the filthy, at times even
of the bloody--he grew frightened with an animal fright before this
intensity of enormous, unvented hatred. Coming to himself, he said:

"One great writer tells of such a case. The Prussians conquered the
French and lorded it over them in every possible way: shot the men,
violated the women, pillaged the houses, burned down the fields...And
so one handsome woman--a Frenchwoman, very handsome,--having become
infected, began out of spite to infect all the Germans who happened to
fall into her embraces. She made ill whole hundreds, perhaps even
thousands...And when she was dying in a hospital, she recalled this
with joy and with pride...[25] But then, those were enemies, trampling
upon her fatherland and slaughtering her brothers...But you, you,
Jennechka! ..."

[25] This story is Lit. No. 29, by Guy de Maupassant.--Trans.

"But I--all, just all! Tell me, Sergei Ivanovich, only tell me on your
conscience: if you were to find in the street a child, whom some one
had dishonoured, had abused...well, let's say, had stuck its eyes out,
cut its ears off--and then you were to find out that this man is at
this minute walking past you, and that only God alone, if only He
exists, is looking at you this minute from heaven--what would you do?"

"Don't know," answered Platonov, dully and downcast; but he paled, and
his fingers underneath the table convulsively clenched into fists,
"Perhaps I would kill him..."

"Not 'perhaps,' but certainly! I know you, I sense you. Well, and now
think: every one of us has been abused so, when we were children! ...
Children! ..." passionately moaned out Jennka and covered her eyes for
a moment with her palm. "Why, it comes to me, you also spoke of this at
one time, in our place--wasn't it on that same evening before the
Trinity? ... Yes, children--fo