shake each other off. I was still unaware that ninety-nine families out
of every hundred live in the same hell, and that it cannot be otherwise.
I had not learned this fact from others or from myself. The coincidences
that are met in regular, and even in irregular life, are surprising. At
the very period when the life of parents becomes impossible, it becomes
indispensable that they go to the city to live, in order to educate
their children. That is what we did."

Posdnicheff became silent, and twice there escaped him, in the
half-darkness, sighs, which at that moment seemed to me like suppressed
sobs. Then he continued.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One
can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long
time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into
your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health
of children, their education. And there are visits that must be received
and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that
one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or three
celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.

"Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one,
now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses, . . . and
life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of the
sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we had a
superb occupation,--the arrangement of the new dwelling, and then, too,
the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to the
city.

"Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to us
which passed unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause of all that
happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals (the doctors)
would not permit her to conceive a child, and taught her how to avoid
it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it, but
she insisted frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered. The last
justification of our life as wretches was thereby suppressed, and life
became baser than ever.

"The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal
relations have a justification. But we, when we have a few children,
have no need of any more. They make a superfluous confusion of expenses
and joint heirs, and are an embarrassment. Consequently we have no
excuses fo