ruining himself and who is living truly or falsely — you or I. If you only knew how despicable and pitiable you, in your delusions, seem to me! When I picture to myself — in place of my hut, my forests, and my love — those drawing-rooms, those women with their pomatum-greased hair eked out with false curls, those unnaturally grimacing lips, those hidden, feeble, distorted limbs, and that chatter of obligatory drawing-room conversation which has no right to the name — I feel unendurably revolted.

I then see before me those obtuse faces, those rich eligible girls whose looks seem to say:

“It’s all right, you may come near though I am rich and eligible” — and that arranging and rearranging of seats, that shameless match-making and that eternal