So be it! What is his name to them? He, nameless though he be, saves them from hunger. Let us try only that what we bring should be really good food. Bitter, unjust reproach on the lips of those you love.... But that, too, can be borne.... ‘Beat me! but listen!’ said the Athenian leader to the Spartan. ‘Beat me! but be healthy and fed!’ we ought to say. _February 1878._ A CONTENTED MAN A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street in the capital. His movements are gay and alert; there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips, a pleasing flush on his beaming face.... He is all contentment and delight. What has happened to him? Has he come in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed cross, O Polish king, Stanislas? No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and--_has himself believed it_! Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute is this amiable, promising young man! _February 1878._ A RULE OF LIFE ‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him! ‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice. ‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience. If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your opponent with having no convictions! ‘If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell him reproachfully that he is slavish ... the slave of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!’ ‘One might even say, the slave of anti-slavishness,’ I suggested. ‘You might even do that,’ assented the cunning knave. _February 1878._ THE END OF THE WORLD A DREAM I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house. The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed. I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another. Not one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency ... all in turn approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something from without.