even in a farce. We're just the same: when we have got
to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view.
It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We
talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied.
We take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of all
proportion with what reality can give us; we get something utterly
different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction,
shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if any one is suffering,
he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go on with this
conversation?

"No, not in the least."

"In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion,
rising from his seat a little:

"Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I
know very well."

He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly
expression:

"A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these
incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness,
or would put it down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I
take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied
because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us and our
children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When
we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love:
love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage
without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires
repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and
novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if
the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna,
or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is
no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we have been
married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three years,
we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others,
and again--disappointment, again--repulsion, and in the long
run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair,
undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far from being superior, are
immeasurably inferior to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and
disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk
about what we've been so cruelly deceived in."

While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and
our Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably
bec