Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/380

366 occurred to me; but there is a young man who loves her, and therefore I do not dare as yet to think about it. This young man is a Christian, and loves us both, and I cannot take a step which would hurt him. I live, not thinking about this. I try to do one thing: to fulfil the law of love to men—this is the only thing I demand: I shall marry when I see that it is proper."

"But it cannot be a matter of indifference to the mother whether she has a good industrious son-in-law or not. She would want you, and not any one else."

"No, it is a matter of indifference to her, because she knows that, besides me, all of us are ready to serve her as well as every one else, and I should serve her neither more nor less whether I were her son-in-law or not. If my marriage to her daughter results, I shall enter upon it with joy, and so I should rejoice even if she married some one else."

"That is impossible!" exclaimed Julius. "This is a horrible thing of you—that you deceive yourselves! And thus you deceive others. That stranger told me correctly about you. When I listen to you I cannot help yielding to the beauty of the life which you describe for me; but as I think it over, I see that it is all deception, leading to savagery, brutality, of life approaching that of brutes."

"Wherein do you see this savagery?"

"In this: that as you subject your own lives to labors, you have no leisure or chance to occupy yourselves with arts and sciences. Here you are in ragged dress, with hardened hands and feet; your fair friend, who might be a goddess of beauty, is like a slave. You have no hymns of Apollo, or temples, or poetry, or games,—none of those things which the gods have given for beautifying the life of man. To work, work like slaves or like oxen merely for a coarse existence—isn't this a voluntary and impious renunciation of the will and nature of man."

"The nature of man again!" said Pamphilius. "But in what does this nature consist? Is it in this, that you torment your slaves with unbearable labors, that you