For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of money.  My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he answered me:  “Non habeo,” I sent him a desperate telegram in which I besought him to mortgage the estate.  A little later I begged him to get money somehow on a second mortgage.  He did this too without a murmur and sent me every farthing.  Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all this was no concern of hers, and when flinging away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad desires I groaned like an old tree, she would be singing “Addio bella Napoli” with a light heart.

Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our tie.  I am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but now I sometimes dreamed of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of our life.  That I might not be completely disgusted with myself, I began reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking and took to eating very little.  If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to night, one’s heart seems lighter.  I began to bore Ariadne too.  The people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the way, all of the middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors, there was no salon, the money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that perhaps she would not be against our returning to Russia.

And here we are on our way.  For the last few months she has been zealously corresponding with her brother; she evidently has some secret projects, but what they are—­God knows!  I am sick of trying to fathom her underhand schemes!  But we’re going, not to the country, but to Yalta and afterwards to the Caucasus.  She can only exist now at watering-places, and if you knew how I hate all these watering-places, how suffocated and ashamed I am in them.  If I could be in the country now!  If I could only be working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my brow, atoning for my follies.  I am conscious of a superabundance of energy and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years.  But now, as you see, there is a complication.  Here we’re not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have to think of lawful wedlock.  Of course, all attraction is over; there is no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in honour to marry her.

——­

Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued talking about women.  It was late.  It appeared that he and I were in the same cabin.

“So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,” said Shamohin.  “There she thinks and feels just as man does, and struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he.  In the towns the woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive condition.  She is half a human beast already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears and in her place is the primitive female.  This dropping-back on the part of the educated woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive movement she tries to drag man after her and prevents him from moving forward.  That is incontestable.”