“For the family, yes. But is that any hindrance for us. You want draperies, for fine feeling, sympathies and the rest of the stuff are nothing but draperies, like those famous leaves with which, it is said, human beings covered themselves in Paradise.”
“Yes, Mark, human beings!”
Mark smiled sarcastically, and shrugged his shoulders.
“They may be draperies,” continued Vera, “but they also, according to your own teaching, are given by nature. What, I ask, is it that attaches you to me? You say you love me. You have altered, grown thinner. Is it not, by your conception of love, a matter of indifference whether you choose a companion in me, or from the poor quarter of our town, or from a village on the Volga. What has induced you to come down here for a whole year?”
“Examine your own fallacy, Vera,” he said, looking at her gloomily. “Love is not a concept merely, but a driving force, a necessity, and therefore is mostly blind. But I am not blindly chained to you. Your extraordinary beauty, your intellect and your free outlook hold me longer in thrall than would be possible with any other woman.”
“Very flattering!” she said in a low, pained voice.
“These ideas of yours, Vera, will bring us to disaster. But for them we should for long have been united and happy.”
“Happy for a time. And then a new driving force will appear on the scene, the stage will be cleared, and so on.”
“The responsibility is not ours. Nature has ordered it so, and rightly. Can we alter Nature, in order to live on concepts?”
“These concepts are essential principles. You have said yourself that Nature has her laws, and human beings their principles.”