But this is one of those lingering, queer lies, going back into
the depth of past decades, which are almost never noticed by a
single one of the professional observers, and in any case are not
described by any one.
If each one of us will try, to put it pompously, to put his hand
on his heart, then every one will catch himself in the fact, that
having once in childhood said some sort of boastful or touching
fiction, which had success, and having repeated it for that reason
two and five and ten times more--he afterwards cannot get rid of
it all his life, and repeats with entire firmness by now a history
which had never been; a firmness such that in the very end he
believes the story. With time Kolya also narrated to his comrades
how his aunt once removed, a young woman of the world had seduced
him. It must be said, however, that the intimate proximity to this
lady--a large, dark-eyed, white faced, sweetly fragrant southern
woman--did really exist; but existed only in Kolya's imagination,
in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary sexual
enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all
men, then ninety-nine, in any case.
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