# The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 18

XVIII.
"Yes, I digress all the time," he began. "Much have I thought over. At many things I now look differently, and I feel like telling about this. Well, we began to live in the city. A man may live a hundred years in the city without perceiving that he has long been dead and decayed. There is no time to balance one's own accounts,—one is too busy with affairs, society obligations, health, art, the children's health, their education. Now you must receive this and that person, now you must visit this and that one; and now again you must look at such and such a one, or listen to what they have to say. In the city there are, at any given moment, one, two, or three celebrities whom you cannot afford to miss. Now you have to cure yourself, or this or that child; and now you have to look for teachers, tutors, governesses, but in reality it is dreadfully empty. Well, thus we lived and felt less the pain of our companionship. Besides, at first we had admirable occupations: getting fixed in the new city and in our new apartments, and our migrations from the city to the country, and from the country back again to the city.
"We passed one winter in this way, but the next winter there happened the following apparently insignificant incident, which was not taken notice of by any one, but which produced that which later took place.
"She was not in good health, and the doctors told her that she must have no children, and taught her how to keep from having them. This disgusted me. I fought against it, but she insisted upon it with frivolous stubbornness, and I had to submit; the last justification of a ​swinish life, the children, was taken away, and life became more abominable still.
"A peasant, a labourer, needs children. It is hard for him to bring them up, but he needs them, and therefore his conjugal relations are justified. But we people who have children, need no more children: they are an additional care, an expense, co-heirs, they are a burden. And thus there is no justification whatsoever for our swinish life. Either we artificially get rid of children or we look upon them as a misfortune, as the result of an accident, and this is still more abominable.
"There are no justifications. But we have fallen morally so deep that we do not even see the need of any justification.
"The majority of the contemporary educated world abandon themselves to this debauchery without the least compunction.
"There is no reason for feeling any compunction, because in our existence there is no other conscience than, if one may call it so, the conscience of public opinion and criminal law. In this case neither the one nor the other are violated there is no cause to be conscience-stricken before society, because they all do it: Márya Pávlovna, and Iván Zakhárych. And what sense would there be in breeding paupers and depriving yourself of the possibility of leading a social life? Nor is there any cause for being conscience-stricken before the criminal law, or to be afraid of it. Those monstrous girls and soldiers' wives throw their children into ponds and wells,—they, of course, must be put in jail,—but we do it all at the proper time and in a decent manner.
"Thus we lived two more years. The measures of the scoundrel doctors apparently began to bear fruit: she became physically stronger and handsomer, like the last beauty of summer. She felt it and paid attention to it. There developed in her a certain provoking beauty which ​made people feel uneasy. She was in all the strength of a thirty-year-old, non-bearing, well-fed, and irritated woman. A glance at her caused uneasiness. When she passed by men, she attracted their glances to her. She was like a long-rested, well-fed harnessed horse when its bridle is taken off. There was no bridle, just as is the case with ninety-nine hundredths of our women. I was conscious of it, and I felt terribly."