How is it you do not understand that if, from nothing, he became what he was, he would not have stopped, and would not for a minute have remained as he was when he died? But, just as from nothing he became a suckling, and from a suckling a child, so from a child he would have become a schoolboy, a youth, a young man, middle-aged, elderly, and then old. You do not know what he would have been had he remained alive⁠ ⁠… but I know!”

And suddenly the mother saw⁠—in the private cabinet of a restaurant, brilliantly lit by electricity (her husband had once taken her to such a place), near a table on which were the remains of a supper⁠—a bloated, wrinkled, unpleasant, would-be-young old man with turned-up moustaches. He was sitting on a soft sofa, in which he sank deep, his drunken eyes gazing with desire at a depraved, painted woman with a white bare neck, and with drunken tongue he shouted something, repeating an indecent joke several times, evidently pleased at the approving laughter of another similar pair.