heme. Kukushkin, always
ingratiating, would fall into his tone, and what followed was to
me, in my mood at that time, a revolting exhibition. The irony of
Orlov and his friends knew no bounds, and spared no one and nothing.
If they spoke of religion, it was with irony; they spoke of philosophy,
of the significance and object of life--irony again, if any one
began about the peasantry, it was with irony.

There is in Petersburg a species of men whose specialty it is to
jeer at every aspect of life; they cannot even pass by a starving
man or a suicide without saying something vulgar. But Orlov and his
friends did not jeer or make jokes, they talked ironically. They
used to say that there was no God, and personality was completely
lost at death; the immortals only existed in the French Academy.
Real good did not and could not possibly exist, as its existence
was conditional upon human perfection, which was a logical absurdity.
Russia was a country as poor and dull as Persia. The intellectual
class was hopeless; in Pekarsky's opinion the overwhelming majority
in it were incompetent persons, good for nothing. The people were
drunken, lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We had no science, our
literature was uncouth, our commerce rested on swindling--"No
selling without cheating." And everything was in that style, and
everything was a subject for laughter.

Towards the end of supper the wine made them more good-humoured,
and they passed to more lively conversation. They laughed over
Gruzin's family life, over Kukushkin's conquests, or at Pekarsky,
who had, they said, in his account book one page headed _Charity_
and another _Physiological Necessities_. They said that no wife was
faithful; that there was no wife from whom one could not, with
practice, obtain caresses without leaving her drawing-room while
her husband was sitting in his study close by; that girls in their
teens were perverted and knew everything. Orlov had preserved a
letter of a schoolgirl of fourteen: on her way home from school she
had "hooked an officer on the Nevsky," who had, it appears, taken
her home with him, and had only let her go late in the evening; and
she hastened to write about this to her school friend to share her
joy with her. They maintained that there was not and never had been
such a thing as moral purity, and that evidently it was unnecessary;
mankind had so far done very well without it. The harm done by
so-called vice was undoubtedly exagg