is, there is justification in pity for the girl. Who could desire her as she is?"
"I cannot make it out. . . ."
"There's a great deal, Liovushka, which you can't make out: you're not shrewd. . . ."
There came in Andrey Lvovitch's wife, and the conversation was interrupted. As she and Suler went out, Leo Nicolayevitch said to me: "Leopold is the purest man I know. He is like that: if he did something bad, it would be out of pity for someone."
XXII
HE talks most of God, of peasants, and of woman; of literature rarely and little, as though literature were something alien to him. Woman, in my opinion, he regards with implacable hostility and loves to punish her, unless she be a Kittie or Natasha Rostov, i.e., a creature not too narrow. It is the hostility of the male who has not succeeded in getting all the pleasure he could, or it is the hostility of spirit against "the degrading impulses of the flesh." But it is hostility, and cold, as in Anna Karenin. Of "the degrading impulses of the flesh" he spoke well on Sunday in a conversation with Tchekhov and Yelpatievsky about Rousseau's Confession. Suler wrote down what he said, and later, while preparing coffee, burnt it in the spirit-lamp. Once before he burnt Leo Nicolayevitch's opinions on Ibsen, and he also lost the notes of the conversation in which Leo Nicolayevitch said very pagan things on the symbolism of
24
