They had met somewhere at a house ball at the home of mutual acquaintances. She on the arm of her husband, a high-ranking civil servant; he alone. She shining, radiant, beautiful, enchantingly lovely; he pale, humble, dreamy, languished. A bewitching power emanated from her being, something so soft and blissful that it pulled the man into the vortex of her feelings. Such women exist: they are born to love. There is such a permeating feeling in them that they appear to be other beings; as though they were not of the same sex as those prosaic, honest women who live their lives like worker bees.

He was a poet. He lived, loved, and suffered in his sunny delusions. But at the same time, he was genuinely of his time and never completely lost sight of the ground under his feet—a philosopher, skeptical and pessimistic.

He hated women, he hated joy because he didn’t have either. The everydayness of the common, the ordinary, the mass-produced repelled him.

They became acquainted with each other. And they began to love one another, not at once; gradually, growing stronger and stronger, the feeling crept into both of their beings. He desired her with the chasteness of his young, yearning body, she—no, she did not desire him. She, the woman without scruples, who was longing for love, did not desire him or at least did not know that she desired him. Something sacred, coupled with awe and love, trembled inside her. Something like a secret fear made her bow to him, forced her to be sincere with him.

She had been suffering for three days since he asked her, tormented by doubt: “Am I your only love? Haven’t you loved someone else?” She said, laughing, “Whatever do you mean? Don’t ask like that, your question alone is insulting,” and made other excuses a woman would make. What was it that made her so melancholy? She forced herself to be silent because otherwise she would have screamed, no! I lied!

What kind of backward state of mind is it that forces us to act in good ways only under the spell of one person and act in evil ways under the spell of another, and all the while, the person influencing us is just as poor as we are, and just as dependent on other individuals?