Saying this, he smiled triumphantly: at times he has the broad, calm smile of a man who has overcome something extremely difficult or from whom some sharp, long-gnawing pain has lifted suddenly. Every thought burrows into his soul like a tick; he either tears it out at once or allows it to have its fill of his blood, and then, when full, it just drops off of itself.
He read to Suler and me a variant of the scene of the fall of "Father Sergius"--a merciless scene. Suler pouted and fidgeted uneasily.
"What's the matter? Don't you like it?" Leo Nicolayevitch asked.
"It's too brutal, as though from Dostoevsky. She is a filthy girl, and her breasts like pancakes, and all that. Why didn't he sin with a beautiful, healthy woman?"
"That would be sin without justification; as it is, there is justification in pity for the girl. Who could desire her as she is?"
"There's a great deal, Liovushka, which you can't make out: you're not shrewd...."
There came in Andrey Lvovitch's wife, and the conversation was interrupted. As she and Suler went out, Leo Nicolayevitch said to me: "Leopold is the purest man I know. He is like that: if he did something bad, it would be out of pity for someone."
He talks most of God, of peasants, and of woman; of literature rarely and little, as 'though literature were something alien to him. Woman, in my opinion, he regards with implacable hostility and loves to punish her, unless she be a Kittie or Natasha Rostov, _i.e.,_ a creature not too narrow. It is the hostility of the male who has not succeeded in getting all the pleasure he could, or it is the hostility of spirit against "the degrading impulses of the flesh." But it is hostility, and cold, as in _Anna Karenin._ Of "the degrading impulses of the flesh" lie spoke well on Sunday in a conversation with Tchekhov and Yelpatievsky about Rousseau's _Confession._ Suler wrote down what he said, and later, while preparing coffee, burnt it in the spirit-lamp. Once before he burnt Leo Nicolayevitch's opinions on Ibsen, and he also lost the notes of the conversation in which Leo Nicolayevitch said very pagan things on the symbolism of the marriage ritual, agreeing to a certain extent with V. V. Rosanov.
In the morning some "stundists" came to Tolstoi from Feodosia, and to-day all day long he spoke about peasants with rapture.