and Maleschi repeated, “Oui, oui,—­du plumaze.”  Oh, ye gods and fishes!  I fancied all the crabs in the Mediterranean rolling on their backs in silent laughter, and raising their claws to heaven, imploring Jove for a thunderbolt!  By the bye, Mrs. Davis borrowed that sentence from me, and I borrowed it from Feuillet.  I kept my gravity, and did not permit myself the slightest smile, but it put me into a merry, cynical humor, the reflection of which still remains with me, and is for the moment the best weapon against scruples of conscience.

Now for the start.  Would it be right for me to fall in love with Pani Kromitzka, and in case of success lead her from the path of duty?  First, let us look at it from a point of honor, as people consider it who call themselves, and whom the world regards as, gentlemen.  There is not a single paragraph there against it.  It is one of the queerest codices ever invented under the sun.  If, for instance, I steal somebody’s money, the disgrace falls upon me, and not upon the man who is robbed, according to the world’s rule of honor; but if I rob him of his wife, it is not I, but the robbed man who is disgraced.  What does it mean?  Is it a mere aberration of the moral sense, or is it that between stealing a man’s purse and stealing his wife, there is such a vast difference that the two cases cannot be even compared?  I have often thought over this, and have come to the conclusion that there is a great difference.  A human being can never be as absolutely a property as a thing, and the taking away somebody’s wife is an act of a double will.  Why should I respect the rights of a husband if his own wife does not?  What is he to me?  I meet a woman who wants to be mine, and I take her.  Her husband does not exist for me; her vows are no affair of mine.  What should hold me back?  Respect for the matrimonial institution?  But if I loved Pani Kromitzka, I would cry out from the very depth of my soul:  “I protest against this marriage; protest against her duties towards Kromitzki.  I am the worm this marriage has crushed; and they tell me, writhing in anguish, to respect it,—­me, who would sting it with my last breath.”  Why; for what reason?  What do I care for a social institution that has wrung from me the last drop of blood, deprived me of my very existence?  Man lives on fish.  Go tell the fish to respect the order that it be skinned alive before being put on the fire.  I protest and sting,—­that is my answer.  Spencer’s ideal of a finally developed man, in whom the individual impulses will be in perfect harmony with social laws, is nothing but an assumption.  I know perfectly that such as Sniatynski would demolish my theory with one question:  “You are then for free-love?” No, nothing of the sort.  I am for myself.  I do not wish to hear anything about your theories.  If you fall in love with another woman, or your wife with somebody else, we shall see what becomes of your rules, paragraphs, and respect for social institutions.  At the worst,