nferior to man, pick out her defects to mock at her, to look
original in her eyes, and to justify their sensuality. Others do
their utmost to raise women to their level, that is, force them to
learn by heart the 35,000 species, to speak and write the same
foolish things as they speak and write themselves."

Liharev's face darkened.

"I tell you that woman has been and always will be the slave of
man," he said in a bass voice, striking his fist on the table. "She
is the soft, tender wax which a man always moulds into anything he
likes. . . . My God! for the sake of some trumpery masculine
enthusiasm she will cut off her hair, abandon her family, die among
strangers! . . . among the ideas for which she has sacrificed herself
there is not a single feminine one. . . . An unquestioning, devoted
slave! I have not measured skulls, but I say this from hard, bitter
experience: the proudest, most independent women, if I have succeeded
in communicating to them my enthusiasm, have followed me without
criticism, without question, and done anything I chose; I have
turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I heard afterwards, shot a
gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my wanderings, and
like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my changing
enthusiasms."

Liharev jumped up and walked up and down the room.

"A noble, sublime slavery!" he said, clasping his hands. "It is
just in it that the highest meaning of woman's life lies! Of all
the fearful medley of thoughts and impressions accumulated in my
brain from my association with women my memory, like a filter, has
retained no ideas, no clever saying, no philosophy, nothing but
that extraordinary, resignation to fate, that wonderful mercifulness,
forgiveness of everything."

Liharev clenched his fists, stared at a fixed point, and with a
sort of passionate intensity, as though he were savouring each word
as he uttered it, hissed through his clenched teeth:

"That . . . that great-hearted fortitude, faithfulness unto death,
poetry of the heart. . . . The meaning of life lies in just that
unrepining martyrdom, in the tears which would soften a stone, in
the boundless, all-forgiving love which brings light and warmth
into the chaos of life. . . ."

Mlle. Ilovaisky got up slowly, took a step towards Liharev, and
fixed her eyes upon his face. From the tears that glittered on his
eyelashes, from his quivering, passionate voice, from the flush on
his cheeks, it was clear