Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/502

 only by submissively following with the whole skein after the thread.

Believe me that there are no external conditions which are good in themselves, and a senseless man who is married to an angel, and another who is married to a devil, is equally dissatisfied, and that many, not only many, but nearly all who are dissatisfied with their marital state (they are all of them dissatisfied) think that there can be nothing worse than their situation. Consequently it is all the same with everybody.

If you look upon woman as an object of enjoyment, even if it were your own wife,—so much the worse if she is your wife,—you are committing adultery and are sinning. With the fulfilment of the law of bread labour, cohabitation has the aim of impersonal enjoyment, of an aid, a continuator; but with superabundance,—that of debauchery.

The gardener's wife has again had a child, and again there came an old woman and took the baby away somewhere.

All are terribly agitated. The use of means for preventing birth is nothing, but for this there are not sufficient condemnatory words.

It was learned to-day that the old midwife has returned and has brought the child back. On the road the midwife came across others who were taking with them just such children. One of these children was given the nipple too far down into the mouth. It pulled it in, and strangled. In one day they brought twenty-five children to Moscow. Of these twenty-five, nine were not accepted, because they were legitimate or sick.

N went in the morning to admonish the gardener's wife. The gardener's wife warmly defended her husband,