Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/349

 becoming to her, and that after a day passed near her I longed for a greater approximation to her.

"It is wonderful how complete the illusion is that beauty is identical with goodness. A beautiful woman says insipid things, but you hear only cleverness. She speaks and does unseemly things, and you see only charm. And when she says no insipidities and does nothing unseemly, you at once come to the conclusion that she is wonderfully clever and moral!

"I returned home in transport and decided that she was the acme of moral perfection, and that therefore she was worthy of being my wife, and so I proposed to her the very next day.

"What a chaos that is! Out of a thousand men who are marrying, not only in our circle, but, unfortunately, also among the masses, there is hardly one who has not been married, like Don Juan, ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand times before his wedding.

"It is true, I now hear of young men—and I have observed it to be so—who feel and know that it is not a joke, but a great deed.

"God help them! But in my days there was not one such in ten thousand. All know this, and yet they pretend not to know it. In all the novels we have detailed descriptions of the heroes, and of ponds and bushes, near which they walk; but, in describing their great love for some maiden, there is nothing said about what had taken place before with the interesting hero,—not a word of his frequenting certain houses, of chambermaids, cooks, and other people's wives. And if there are such indecent novels, they are never put into the hands of those who, above all others, ought to know it, into girls' hands.

"At first we pretend before these girls that the debauchery which fills one-half of our cities, and even of the villages, does not exist at all.

"Then we all get so used to this pretence that, like the