sister, a fiancee, before undressing
and examining a female patient. . . . That advice would be very
good not only for medical students but for everyone who in one way
or another has to deal with a woman's life. Now that I have a wife
and a little daughter, oh, how well I understand that advice! How
I understand it, my God! You may as well hear the rest, though. . . .
As soon as she had become my mistress, Kisotchka's view of the
position was very different from mine. First of all she felt for
me a deep and passionate love. What was for me an ordinary amatory
episode was for her an absolute revolution in her life. I remember,
it seemed to me that she had gone out of her mind. Happy for the
first time in her life, looking five years younger, with an inspired
enthusiastic face, not knowing what to do with herself for happiness,
she laughed and cried and never ceased dreaming aloud how next day
we would set off for the Caucasus, then in the autumn to Petersburg;
how we would live afterwards.

"'Don't worry yourself about my husband,' she said to reassure me.
'He is bound to give me a divorce. Everyone in the town knows that
he is living with the elder Kostovitch. We will get a divorce and
be married.'

"When women love they become acclimatised and at home with people
very quickly, like cats. Kisotchka had only spent an hour and a
half in my room when she already felt as though she were at home
and was ready to treat my property as though it were her own. She
packed my things in my portmanteau, scolded me for not hanging my
new expensive overcoat on a peg instead of flinging it on a chair,
and so on.

"I looked at her, listened, and felt weariness and vexation. I was
conscious of a slight twinge of horror at the thought that a
respectable, honest, and unhappy woman had so easily, after some
three or four hours, succumbed to the first man she met. As a
respectable man, you see, I didn't like it. Then, too, I was
unpleasantly impressed by the fact that women of Kisotchka's sort,
not deep or serious, are too much in love with life, and exalt what
is in reality such a trifle as love for a man to the level of bliss,
misery, a complete revolution in life. . . . Moreover, now that I
was satisfied, I was vexed with myself for having been so stupid
as to get entangled with a woman whom I should have to deceive. And
in spite of my disorderly life I must observe that I could not bear
telling lies.

"I remember that Kisotchka s