about. Everything that could be said about the life which was in store for us, about arrangements and plans, had been said,—and what next? If we had been animals we would have known that there is no need of talking; here, on the contrary, we had to talk, but there was nothing to talk about, because we were not interested in that which could be gleaned from our conversations. Then there was that ugly habit of eating candy, that coarse gormandizing on sweets, and all those abominable preparations for the wedding: the talks about the apartments, the sleeping-room, the beds, the capotes, the morning-gowns, the linen, the toilets— You must consider that if people marry according to the injunctions of the Domostroy, as the old man remarked, then the feather beds, the dowry, the beds,—all these are only details corresponding to the mystery. But with us, where of every ten people thinking of matrimony nine certainly do not believe in any mystery, and do not believe even that that which they do puts them under any obligations, when there is hardly one out of a hundred men who has not been married before, and of fifty hardly one who does not prepare himself in advance to be false to his wife on any convenient occasion, when the majority look upon the church ceremony as only a special condition for getting possession of a certain woman,—think what terrible meaning all these details have under these conditions. It turns out that the whole question lies only in this: it turns out to be a kind of sale. An innocent girl is sold to a libertine, and this sale is surrounded with certain formalities.
