The gentleman said: "Not at all. If you want to hang yourself, first you’ve got to get up on the window sill. And who will open the gas jet for you if you want to poison yourself? You could only buy a revolver secretly through a servant. But suppose the shot misses? To drown yourself you’ve got to take an automobile and have yourself carried down to the river on a stretcher by two attendants who have to haul you to the far bank." I said: "That’s for me to worry about." The gentleman said: "You’re wrong, I’ve been thinking since you’ve been siting here how one might get rid of you. Do you think that a man without legs makes a sympathetic picture? Has the right to live? On the contrary, you create a terrible disturbance for the aesthetic feelings of your fellow human beings." I said: "I am a full professor of ethics and aesthetics at the university. May I introduce myself?" The gentleman said: "How are you going to do that? Clearly you cannot imagine how impossible you are, in your condition." I looked sadly at my stumps. II Soon the lady opposite me said: "To have no legs must be a very odd feeling." I said: "Yes." The lady said: "I would not like to touch a man who had no legs." I said: "I am very clean." The lady said: "I must overcome a great erotic disgust to speak with you, not to mention looking at you." I said: "Really..." The lady said: "I don’t believe that you are a criminal. You might be a wise and, in your original condition, nice person. But I could not, with the best will in the world, have relations with you, because you have no legs." I said: "One gets used to everything." The lady said: "That a man has no legs causes a naturally sensitive woman to feel an inexplicable, profound terror. As though you had committed a disgusting sin." I said: "But I am innocent. I lost one leg in the excitement of assuming my professorial chair for the first time, the other I lost when, sunk in thought, I found that important aesthetic law which led to basic changes in our discipline." The lady said: "What is the name of that law?" I said: "The law says: everything depends on the structure of the soul and the mind. If soul and mind are noble, a body must be considered beautiful, no matter how humped and misshapen it may be." The lady ostentatiously lifted her dress and revealed, right up to the top of her thigh, sheathed sumptuously in silk, wonderful legs, that towered, like branches, from her ripe body. At the same time the lady finally said: "You may be right, although one might as easily argue the opposite. In any case, a person with legs is totally different from one without them." Then, striding proudly away, she left me sitting there. Savior of the theater Theaters should stop competing with the cinema. By doing so, they are thereby achieving –--rejoice, friends of the theater – the opposite of what they want: they are perishing.