“You here! I tell you it’s really impossible to go anywhere with Yegor! What a fellow he is! I don’t understand him! He has got up a scene! Do you hear? Yegor!” he shouted at the door. “Yegor!” “I won’t allow you to hit women!” the artist’s piercing voice sounded from above. Something heavy and lumbering rolled down the stairs. It was the artist falling headlong. Evidently he had been pushed downstairs. He picked himself up from the ground, shook his hat, and, with an angry and indignant face, brandished his fist towards the top of the stairs and shouted: “Scoundrels! Torturers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow you to hit them! To hit a weak, drunken woman! Oh, you brutes!...” “Yegor!... Come, Yegor!...” the medical student began imploring him. “I give you my word of honor I’ll never come with you again. On my word of honor I won’t!” Little by little the artist was pacified and the friends went homewards. “Against my will an unknown force,” hummed the medical student, “has led me to these mournful shores.” “Behold the mill,” the artist chimed in a little later, “in ruins now. What a lot of snow, Holy Mother! Grisha, why did you go? You are a funk, a regular old woman.” Vassilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and thought: “One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and we exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slaveowners, violators, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that are described in the ‘Neva.’ Now they are singing, laughing, talking sense, but haven’t they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and stupidity? They have--I have been a witness of it. What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of the piece of bacon in the story. Two brigands murdered a beggar in a forest; they began sharing his clothes between them, and found in his wallet a piece of bacon. ‘Well found,’ said one of them, ‘let us have a bit.’ ‘What do you mean? How can you?’ cried the other in horror. ‘Have you forgotten that to-day is Wednesday?’ And they would not eat it. After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were keeping the fast. In the same way these men, after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science....”