o is worthy
to return to the gates of Paradise? Not a single human being."

And, indeed, I found it a waste of time to dispute the matter, for he
merely listened to what I had to say, and then, without an attempt at
refutation, repeated in the same tone as before, and exactly in the
same words, his statement that "Adam lost Paradise for the reason that
he allowed Eve to corrupt him."

Similarly did women constitute our most usual subject of conversation.

"You are young," once he said, "and therefore a human being bound to
find forbidden fruit blocking your way at every step. This because the
human race is a slave to its love of sin, or, in other words, to love
of the Serpent. Yes, woman constitutes the prime impediment to
everything in life, as history has many times affirmed. And first and
foremost is she the source of restlessness. 'Charged with poison, the
Serpent shall plunge in thee her fangs.' Which Serpent is, of course,
our desire of the flesh, the Serpent at whose instigation the Greeks
razed towns to the ground, and ravaged Troy and Carthagena and Egypt,
and the Serpent which caused an amorous passion for the sister of
Alexander Pavlovitch [The Emperor Alexander I] to bring about
Napoleon's invasion of Russia. On the other hand, both the Mohammedan
nations and the Jews have from earliest times grasped the matter
aright, and kept their women shut up in their back premises; whereas WE
permit the foulest of profligacy to exist, and walk hand in hand with
our women, and allow them to graduate as female doctors and to pull
teeth, and all the rest of it. The truth is that they ought not to be
allowed to advance beyond midwife, since it is woman's business either
to serve as a breeding animal or opprobriously to be called
neiskusobrachnaia neviesta [Maid who hast never tasted of marriage.]
Yes, woman's business should end there."

Near the stove there ticks and clicks on the grimy wall that is papered
with "rules and regulations" and sheets of yellow manuscript the
pendulum of a small clock, with, hanging to one of its weights, a
hammer and a horseshoe, and, to the other, a copper pestle. Also, in a
corner of the room a number of ikons make a glittering show with their
silver applique and the gilded halos which surmount their figures'
black visages, while a stove with a ponderous grate glowers out of the
window at the greenery in Zhitnaia Street and beyond the ravine (beyond
the ravine everything looks bright an