t was entirely different from what he
had expected.

Then chance came to his aid, for in the pension where he was living,
thirty women were stopping. He saw them at all meals, between meals, and
all about, idle, gossiping, pretentious, longing for pleasure. "There
were learned ladies who left the Saturday Review behind them on the
chairs; there were literary ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies."
When he saw their care-free, idle life, with concern he asked himself:
"Whom do these parasites and their children live on?" Then he discovered
the bread-winners. "The husband sat in his dark office far away in
London; the husband was far away with a detachment in Tonkin; the
husband was at work in his bureau in Paris; the husband had gone on a
business trip to Australia." And the three men who were there gave
him occasion to reflect about the so-called female slave. "There was a
husband who had a fiercely hot attic room, while the wife and daughter
had a room with a balcony on the first floor. An elderly man passed by,
who, although himself a brisk walker, was now leading his sickly wife
step by step, his hand supporting her back when making an ascent; he
carried her shawls, chair, and other little necessities, reverently,
lovingly, as if he had become her son when she had ceased to be his
wife. And there sat King Lear with his daughter,--it was terrible
to see. He was over sixty, had had eight children, six of whom were
daughters, and who, in his days of affluence, he had allowed to manage
his house and, no doubt, the economy thereof. Now he was poor, had
nothing, and they had all deserted him except one daughter who had
inherited a small income from an aunt. And the former giant, who had
been able to work for a household of twelve, crushed by the disgrace of
bankruptcy, was forced to feel the humiliation of accepting support
from his daughter, who went about with her twenty-nine women friends,
receiving their comfort and condolence, weeping over her fate, and
sometimes actually wishing the life out of her father."

The immediate result of all this observation and consequent analysis was
the collection of short stories in two volumes called "Marriages," the
first of which, published in 1884, gave rise to Strindberg's reputation
of being a pessimist, and the second, two years later, to that of
woman-hater, which became confirmed by the portrayals of women in his
realistic dramas that soon followed, notably that of Laura in