“But she bears his name, of course!” said Orlov.

“Yes, he may be legally obliged to accept the child—I don’t know; but I came to you, Georgy Ivanitch,” not to discuss the legal aspect.”

“Yes, yes, you are right,” he agreed briskly. “I believe I am talking nonsense. But don’t excite yourself. We will decide the matter to our matual satisfaction. If one thing won’t do, we’ll try another; and if that won’t do, we’ll try a third—one way or another this delicate question shall be settled. Pekarsky will arrange it all. Be so good as to leave me your address and I will let you know at once what we decide. Where are you living?”

Orlov wrote down my address, sighed, and said with a smile:

“Oh, Lord, what job it is to be the father of a little daughter! But Pekarsky will arrange it all. He is a sensible man. Did you stay long in Paris?”

“Two months.”

We were silent. Orlov was evidently afraid I should begin talking of the child again, and to turn my attention in another direction, said:

“You have probably forgotten your letter by now. But I have kept it. I understand your mood at the time, and, I must own, I respect that letter. ‘Damnable cold blood,’ ‘Asiatic,’ ‘coarse laugh’—that was charming and characteristic,” he went on with an ironical smile. “And the fundamental thought is perhaps near the truth, though one might dispute the question endlessly. That is,” he hesitated, “not dispute the thought itself, but your attitude to the question—your temperament, so to say. Yes, my life is abnormal, corrupted, of no use to any one, and what prevents me from beginning a new life is cowardice—there you are quite right. But that you take it so much to heart, are troubled, and reduced to despair by it—that’s irrational; there you are quite wrong.”

“A living man cannot help being troubled and reduced to despair when he sees that he himself is going to ruin and others are going to ruin round him.”

“Who doubts it! I am not advocating indifference; all I ask for is an objective attitude to life. The more objective, the less danger of falling into error. One must look into the root of things, and try to see in every phenomenon a cause of all the other causes. We have grown feeble, slack—degraded, in fact. Our generation is entirely composed of neurasthenics and whimperers; we do nothing but talk of fatigue and exhaustion. But the fault is neither yours nor mine; we are of too little consequence to affect the destiny of a whole generation. We must suppose for that larger, more general causes with a solid raison d’être from the biological point of view. We are neurasthenics, flabby, renegades, but perhaps it’s necessary and of service for generations that will come after us. Not one hair falls from the head without the will of the Heavenly Father—in other words, nothing happens by chance in Nature and in human environment. Everything has its cause and is inevitable. And if so, why should we worry and write despairing letters?”

“That’s all very well,” I said, thinking a little. “I believe it will be easier and clearer for the generations to come; our experience will be at their service. But one wants to live apart from future generations and not only for their sake. Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play a striking, independent, noble part; one wants to make history so that those generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse…I believe what is going on about us is inevitable and not without a purpose, but what have I to do with that inevitability? Why should my ego be lost?”

“Well, there’s no help for it,” sighed Orlov, getting up and, as it were, giving me to understand that our conversation was over.