Chapter 22

"All that day I did not speak to my wife. I could not. Her proximity
excited such hatred that I feared myself. At the table she asked me, in
presence of the children, when I was to start upon a journey. I was to
go the following week to an assembly of the Zemstvo, in a neighboring
locality. I named the date. She asked me if I would need anything for
the journey. I did not answer. I sat silent at the table, and silently
I retired to my study. In those last days she never entered my study,
especially at that hour. Suddenly I heard her steps, her walk, and then
a terribly base idea entered my head that, like the wife of Uri, she
wished to conceal a fault already committed, and that it was for
this reason that she came to see me at this unseasonable hour. 'Is it
possible,' thought I, 'that she is coming to see me?' On hearing her
step as it approached: 'If it is to see me that she is coming, then I am
right.'

"An inexpressible hatred invaded my soul. The steps drew nearer, and
nearer, and nearer yet. Would she pass by and go on to the other room?
No, the hinges creaked, and at the door her tall, graceful, languid
figure appeared. In her face, in her eyes, a timidity, an insinuating
expression, which she tried to hide, but which I saw, and of which I
understood the meaning. I came near suffocating, such were my efforts to
hold my breath, and, continuing to look at her, I took my cigarette, and
lighted it.

"'What does this mean? One comes to talk with you, and you go to
smoking.'

"And she sat down beside me on the sofa, resting against my shoulder. I
recoiled, that I might not touch her.

"'I see that you are displeased with what I wish to play on Sunday,'
said she.

"'I am not at all displeased,' said I.

"'Can I not see?'

"'Well, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. Only to you every
baseness is agreeable, and I abhor it.'

"'If you are going to swear like a trooper, I am going away.'

"'Then go away. Only know that, if the honor of the family is nothing to
you, to me it is dear. As for you, the devil take you!'

"'What! What is the matter?'

"'Go away, in the name of God.'

"But she did not go away. Was she pretending not to understand, or did
she really not understand what I meant? But she was offended and became
angry.

"'You have become absolutely impossible,' she began, or some such phrase
as that regarding my character, trying, as usual, to give me as much
pain as possible. 'After what you have done to my sister (she referred
to an incident with her sister, in which, beside myself, I had uttered
brutalities; she knew that that tortured me, and tried to