“Well then, I’ll tell you. But do you really want to hear it?”
I repeated that I wished it very much. He paused, rubbed his face with his hands, and began:
“If I am to tell it, I must tell everything from the beginning: I must tell how and why I married, and the kind of man I was before my marriage.
“Till my marriage I lived as everybody does, that is, everybody in our class. I am a landowner and a graduate of the university, and was a marshal of the gentry. Before my marriage I lived as everyone does, that is, dissolutely; and while living dissolutely I was convinced, like everyone else in our class, that I was living as one has to. I thought I was a charming fellow and quite a moral man. I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, did not make that the chief purpose of my life as many of my associates did, but I practiced debauchery in a steady, decent way for health’s sake. I avoided women who might tie my hands by having a child or by attachment for me. However, there may have been children and attachments, but I acted as if there were not. And this I not only considered moral, but I was even proud of it.”
He paused and gave vent to his peculiar sound, as he evidently did whenever a new idea occurred to him.
“And you know, that is the chief abomination!” he exclaimed. “Dissoluteness does not lie in anything physical—no kind of physical misconduct is debauchery; real debauchery lies precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you have physical intimacy. And such emancipation I regarded as a merit. I remember how I once worried because I had not had an opportunity to