wled Samoylenko, looking angrily at the
zoologist. "You had better eat your dinner."

The next course consisted of boiled mullet with Polish sauce.
Samoylenko helped each of his companions to a whole mullet and
poured out the sauce with his own hand. Two minutes passed in
silence.

"Woman plays an essential part in the life of every man," said the
deacon. "You can't help that."

"Yes, but to what degree? For each of us woman means mother, sister,
wife, friend. To Laevsky she is everything, and at the same time
nothing but a mistress. She--that is, cohabitation with her--
is the happiness and object of his life; he is gay, sad, bored,
disenchanted--on account of woman; his life grows disagreeable
--woman is to blame; the dawn of a new life begins to glow, ideals
turn up--and again look for the woman. . . . He only derives
enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is woman. Our age
is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and the sixties
only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves obviously to
the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must have in
their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which stifles
the brain and directs their whole psychology. Watch Laevsky when
he is sitting anywhere in company. You notice: when one raises any
general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or
instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks
languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him,
everything is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male
and female--for instance, of the fact that the female spider,
after fertilisation, devours the male--his eyes glow with curiosity,
his face brightens, and the man revives, in fact. All his thoughts,
however noble, lofty, or neutral they may be, they all have one
point of resemblance. You walk along the street with him and meet
a donkey, for instance. . . . 'Tell me, please,' he asks, 'what
would happen if you mated a donkey with a camel?' And his dreams!
Has he told you of his dreams? It is magnificent! First, he dreams
that he is married to the moon, then that he is summoned before the
police and ordered to live with a guitar . . ."

The deacon burst into resounding laughter; Samoylenko frowned and
wrinkled up his face angrily so as not to laugh, but could not
restrain himself, and laughed.

"And it's all nonsense!" he said, wiping his tears. "Yes, by Jove,
it's nonsense!"

IV