She is right, Idalia: I had taken all things—and that also—too much in earnest. At present, I am trying to live more practically than I ever did.
Of the present situation, nothing can come—neither marriage nor anything else. So, as I reckon, it may last at the most one year more. I have to be prepared for that, and let the parting come by degrees and as easily as possible; so I am looking beforehand for some rock or other to which I may cling when wrecked. Now and then, when I think of my ideals once cherished in the past, the notion still comes to me (though rarely) of a love both deep and wise.
Better seek something far other than love—an “aim in life”—some idea—asceticism—even such as a nunnery can provide! “Dans la bête assouvie un ange se réveille!” Yes, but—is it “assouvie”? Well, I am rather tired, not only of love, but of the whole atmosphere I am living in.
In truth, disdain of all things is best of all. Yet again, disdain itself would be one of the things to be disdained!
I am curiously entangled at present, and can scarcely recognize myself as “Her of the Ice-Plains.” In this continual struggle with myself, my strength has been exhausted.
Ah, yes; another incident. Czolhanski has proposed to me in the most naïve fashion imaginable. Although I am a woman of “advanced” ideas (and they say such a one hardly can make a good wife), still he is not alarmed; he trusts in me! Besides, he could not live with any woman unable to understand him.... Also, he gets two hundred roubles a month, which, together with my office salary, ... And so on.
I have refused him categorically, hopelessly, irrevocably. And—which is much more strange—I have done so without the shadow of a smile.
When I am very weary and out of sorts, I go and call up Wiazewski. There are people who resemble those ships which were formerly used by slave traders to convey their human freight: these had a double hold. And Wiazewski is one of such men.
He allows any one to overhaul his soul on the asking, freely and frankly. Only he does not like them, when they come to the hold, to knock too hard: the hollow sound underneath would betray his secret. Beneath the false bottom, there is a dark den into which he smuggles those he has enslaved to his will, never to go out free into the world again. The knowledge of this would spoil his reputation in society as an estimable man.
“Do you know, Stephen, you look like a man who has a bit of a tragedy upon his conscience, and is concealing it.”