the facts, I finish now in an hour what used to take me several hours. And I can grasp with my mind many more facts than before, and the conclusions drawn from them are broader and fuller. Viérotchka, if I had the slightest germ of genius with this feeling, I should become a great genius. If I had been endowed by nature with the power of creating something new in science, with this feeling I should have the power of reorganizing science. But I was born merely to be a rough laborer, a swarthy little toiler, who works over little special questions. Such I was before I knew you; now you know I am different. More is expected of me; it is supposed that I am going to reorganize the most important branch of science, the whole teaching about the functions of the nervous system; and I feel that I am going to fulfil this expectation. At the age of twenty-four a man's views are wider and bolder and more original, than when he reaches the age of twenty-nine, and the same is true at the age of thirty and thirty-two, and so on; but then it was not true of me as it is now, and I feel that I am still progressing, while without you I should long ago have ceased to grow. Yes, and I did cease to grow the last two or three years before we began to live together. You brought back to me the freshness of my early youth, the power of going vastly further than where I should have stopped, if it had not been for you. And the energy of work, Viérotchka, does that signify little! An immense stimulus of strength is brought into labor when your whole life is so inclined. You know how the energy of intellectual labor is simulated by a glass of coffee; what they afford others for an hour after, which follows a reaction proportionate to these outward and transitory stimuli, this I find constantly; my nerves are constantly attuned to finer, more vital energies." ("Again coarse materialism!" we remark, etc.)
These conversations are more frequent and longer.
"He who has not experienced how love stimulates all the powers of a man knows not what real love is."
"Love consists in elevating others, and in being elevated."
"He who has no stimulus to activity without it finds such stimulus in love; and if a man has a stimulus, love gives him strength to use it to advantage."
"Only he loves who helps a lovely woman to rise to independence."
