Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/493

 pronounce this word in relation to such a subject), if he knows one woman; but what will be moderation for the man will be a terrible immoderation for the woman who is in the period of pregnancy or nursing.

I think that the backwardness of women and their hysterical condition are for the most part due to this. It is from this that woman ought to be freed, in order that she may become one body with her husband, and the servant, not of the devil, which she now is, but of God. The ideal is remote, but great. Why should we not strive after it?

I imagine that marriage ought to be like this: the pair cohabit carnally under the invincible pressure of amorousness, the child is conceived, and the conjugal pair, avoiding everything which for her may impair the growth or the nutrition of the child, avoiding every carnal temptation, and not evoking it, as is done nowadays, live together as brother and sister.

As it now is, the man, who was debauched before, transfers his methods of debauchery to his wife, infects her with the same sensuality, and imposes upon her the intolerable burden of being at the same time a sweetheart, an exhausted mother, and a sickly, hysterical person. And the husband loves her as a sweetheart, ignores her as a mother, and despises her for her irritability and hysteria, which he himself induces in her. It seems to me that in this is to be found the key to all the sufferings which in an enormous majority of the cases is hidden in all families.

And so I imagine that husband and wife live like brother and sister; she bears calmly, nurses without impairment, and with this grows morally, and only in free periods do they abandon themselves to amorousness, which lasts some weeks, and again there is calm.

I imagine that this amorousness is that steam pressure which would burst the boiler if the safety-valve did not