Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/343

 ing oneself from the moral relations with a woman, with whom one enters into physical communion. It was this liberation on which I prided myself. I remember how I was once tormented when I was not able to pay a woman who, having evidently fallen in love with me, had abandoned herself to me, and how my conscience was appeased only when I sent her the money, by which I showed that I morally did not regard myself as in the least under any obligations to her. Don't shake your head as though you agreed with me," he suddenly called out to me. "I know all about that. All of you, and you, too, if by some rare chance you are not an exception, hold the same views which I once held. Well, never mind, pardon me," he continued, "but the main thing is, this is terrible, terrible, terrible!"

"What is terrible?" I asked.

"That abyss of delusions in which we live as regards women and our relations with them. Yes, I cannot speak of this calmly, not because this episode, as he called it, has happened to me, but because, when this episode happened to me, my eyes were opened; and I suddenly saw everything in an entirely different light,—everything topsyturvy, everything topsyturvy!"

He lighted a cigarette and, leaning on his knees, began to speak.

I could not see his face in the darkness of the car, but above the rumbling of the car I heard his impressive and pleasant voice.