"Who thrashed?
Whom?" cried Lebeziatnikov, flustered and blushing.
"Why, you thrashed Katerina Ivanovna a month ago.
I heard so yesterday... so that's what your convictions amount to... and the woman question, too, wasn't quite sound, he-he-he!" and Pyotr Petrovitch, as though comforted, went back to clicking his beads.
"It's all slander and nonsense!" cried Lebeziatnikov, who was always afraid of allusions to the subject. "It was not like that at all, it was quite different.
You've heard it wrong; it's a libel.
I was simply defending myself.
She rushed at me first with her nails, she pulled out all my whiskers....
It's permissable for anyone, I should hope, to defend himself and I never allow anyone to use violence to me on principle, for it's an act of despotism.
What was I to do?
I simply pushed her back."
"He-he-he!" Luzhin went on laughing maliciously.
"You keep on like that because you are out of humour yourself....
But that's nonsense and it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with the woman question!
You don't understand; I used to think, indeed, that if women are equal to men in all respects, even in strength (as is maintained now) there ought to be equality in that, too.
Of course, I reflected afterwards that such a question ought not really to arise, for there ought not to be fighting and in the future society fighting is unthinkable... and that it would be a queer thing to seek for equality in fighting.
I am not so stupid... though, of course, there is fighting... there won't be later, but at present there is... confound it!
How muddled one gets with you!
It's not on that account that I am not going.
I am not going on principle, not to take part in the revolting convention of memorial dinners, that's why!
Though, of course, one might go to laugh at it....
I am sorry there won't be any priests at it.
I should certainly go if there were."
"Then you would sit down at another man's table and insult it and those who invited you.
Eh?"
"Certainly not insult, but protest.
I should do it with a good object.
I might indirectly assist the cause of enlightenment and propaganda.
It's a duty of every man to work for enlightenment and propaganda and the more harshly, perhaps, the better.
I might drop a seed, an idea....
And something might grow up from that seed.
How should I be insulting them?
They might be offended at first, but afterwards they'd see I'd done them a service.
You know, Terebyeva (who is in the community now) was blamed because when she left her family and... devoted... herself, she wrote to her father and mother that she wouldn't go on living conventionally and was entering on a free marriage and it was said that that was too harsh, that she might have spared them and have written more kindly.
I think that's all nonsense and there's no need of softness; on the contrary, what's wanted is protest.
Varents had been married seven years, she abandoned her two children, she told her husband straight out in a letter:
'I have realised that I cannot be happy with you.
I can never forgive you that you have deceived me by concealing from me that there is another organisation of society by means of the communities.
I have only lately learned it from a great-hearted man to whom I have given myself and with whom I am establishing a community.
I speak plainly because I consider it dishonest to deceive you.
Do as you think best.
Do not hope to get me back, you are too late.
I hope you will be happy.'
That's how letters like that ought to be written!"
"Is that Terebyeva the one you said had made a third free marriage?"
"No, it's only the second, really!
But what if it were the fourth, what if it were the fifteenth, that's all nonsense!
And if ever I regretted the death of my father and mother, it is now, and I sometimes think if my parents were living what a protest I would have aimed at them!
I would have done something on purpose...
I would have shown them!