Part 2 - Chapter 8 - Page 2

that of a man who, wile calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge,
should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that
there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge
that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.
For the first time the question presented itself to him of the
possibility of his wife's loving someone else, and he was
horrified at it.

He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread
over the resounding parquet of the dining room, where one lamp
was burning, over the carpet of the dark drawing room, in which
the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself
handing over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles
burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman
friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her writing table, that
he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom
door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk,
especially at the parquet of the lighted dining room, he halted
and said to himself, "Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to;
I must express my view of it and my decision." And he turned
back again. "But express what--what decision?" he said to
himself in the drawing room, and he found no reply. "But after
all," he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, "what has
occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But
what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they
please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her,"
he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum,
which had always had such weight with him before, had now no
weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he
turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing room some
inner voice told him that it was not so, and that if others
noticed it that showed that there was something. And he said to
himself again in the dining room, "Yes, I must decide and put a
stop to it, and express my view of it..." And again at the turn
in the drawing room he asked himself, "Decide how?" And again
he asked himself, "What had occurred?" and answered, "Nothing,"
and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his
wife; but again in the drawing room he was convinced that
something had happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round
a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed
this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.

There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case
lying at the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly
changed. He began to think of her, of what she was thinking and
feeling. For the first time he pictured vividly to himself her
personal life, her ideas, her