sioned articles on the equal rights of women; and catchpoles, and
spies, and escaped convicts, and officers, and students, and Social
Democrats, and hired patriots; the timid and the brazen, the sick and
the well, those knowing woman for the first time, and old libertines
frayed by all species of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and
monsters maliciously distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men
without noses, with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath,
bald, trembling, covered with parasites--pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal
apes. They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they
sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance,
executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of
sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross haste,
they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that they will
never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in advance, and on
the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body of their predecessor,
aimlessly commit the very greatest and most beautiful of all universal
mysteries--the mystery of the conception of new life. And the women
with indifferent readiness, with uniform words, with practiced
professional movements, satisfy their desires, like machines--only to
receive, right after them, during the same night, with the very same
words, smiles and gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not
infrequently already biding his turn in the waiting room.

So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak Yama little by little
grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated, spacious,
plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with shutters fixed on the
windows. But toward evening the women awaken and get ready for the
following night.

And so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live a
strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by society,
accursed by the family, victims of the social temperament, cloacas for
the excess of the city's sensuality, the guardians of the honour of the
family--four hundred foolish, lazy, hysterical, barren women.

CHAPTER II.

Two in the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment of
Anna Markovna everything is plunged in sleep. The large square parlor
with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs placed
decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of Makovsky's Feast
of the Russian Noblemen, an