married off by their parents to men suffering from a well-known disease. Oh, oh, what abomination! The time will come when such abomination and lie shall be laid bare!"
He several times emitted his strange sounds, and took to drinking tea. The tea was dreadfully strong,—there was no water with which to weaken it. I felt that the two glasses which I had drunk had made me very nervous. The tea seemed to have affected him, too, for he became ever more agitated. His voice became more and more sonorous and expressive. He continually changed his position; he now took off his cap, and now put it on again, and his face assumed strange forms in the semidarkness in which we were sitting.
"Well, thus I lived to my thirtieth year, not giving up for a minute my intention of marrying and preparing for a most elevated and pure family life. For this purpose I looked around for a girl who would best answer to these requirements," he continued. "I besmirched myself in the mire of debauchery, and, at the same time, scrutinized girls to see who from her purity would be most worthy of me.
"I threw out many of them simply because they were not sufficiently pure for my purpose; finally I found one whom I considered worthy of me. She was one of two daughters of a former rich Pénza landed proprietor, who had lost his fortune.
"One evening, after we had had an outing in a boat, and in the night, when we returned home in the moonlight, and I was sitting near her and admiring her stately figure, which was well set off by a jersey, and her locks, I suddenly decided that it was she. It appeared to me on that evening that she understood everything, everything which I felt and thought, and that I felt and thought nothing but the most elevated things, whereas in reality it was only that her jersey and her locks were very
