He saw this quite clearly. He and Anastasya were a superfluity, and destructive conflict. It was like a mother being given a child to bear the same size already as herself. Anastasya was in every way too big; she was too big physically. But did not sex change the whole question, when it was a _woman_? He did not agree to this. Woman and the sexual sphere seemed to him to be an average from which _everything_ came: from it everything rose, or attempted to rise. There was no mysterious opposition extending up into Heaven, and dividing Heavenly Beings into Gods and Goddesses. There was only one God, and he was a man. A woman was a lower form of life. Everything was female to begin with. A jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped on the beds and in the _bas-fonds_ of everything. Above a certain level of life sex disappeared, just as in highly organized sensualism sex vanishes. And, on the other hand, _everything_ beneath that line was female. Bard, Simpson, Mackenzie, Townsend, Annandale—he enumerated acquaintances evidently below the absolute line, and who displayed a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric state, and almost purely emotional reactions. He knew that everything on the superior side of that line was not purged of jellyish attributes; also that Anastasya’s flaccid and fundamental charms were formidable, although the line had been crossed by her. One thing was impressive, however. The loss of Anastasya did not worry him, except magnified through the legal acquisition of Bertha. What did he _want_? Well, he did not want Anastasya _as much as he should_. He was incorrigible, he concluded. He regarded the Anastasya evening as a sort of personal defeat even. The call of duty was nevertheless very strong. He _ought_ to love Anastasya; and his present intentions as regards his despicable fiancée were a disgraceful betrayal, etc. etc. The mutterings of reason continued. * * * * * That evening he met Anastasya. The moment he saw her he realized the abysses of indignity and poorness he was flinging himself into with Bertha Lunken. A sudden humbleness entered him and put him out of conceit with his judgment, formed away from bright objects like Anastasya. The selfishness that caused his sentimentality when alone with Bertha was dissipated or not used in presence of more or less successful objects and people. None of his ego was required by his new woman. She possessed plenty of her own. This, he realized later, was the cause of his lack of attachment. He needed an empty vessel to flood with his vitality, and not an equal and foreign vitality to exist side by side with coldly. He had taken into sex the _procédés_ and selfish arrangements of life in general. He had humanized sex too much. He frequently admitted this, but with his defence lost sight of the flagrancy of the permanent fact.