Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now

scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with

hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and

large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of

her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things

scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which

she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she

stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give

her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she

was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was

Advertisement..

just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times

already in these last three days--to sort out the children's

things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's--and

again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as

each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot

go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put

him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the

suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell

herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that

this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get

out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him.

Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she

could hardly manage to look after her five children properly,

they would be still worse off where she was going with them all.

As it was, even in the course of these three days, the youngest

was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others had

almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was

conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating

herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and

pretending she was going.

Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the

bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at

him when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she

tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed

bewilderment and suffering.

"Dolly!" he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head

towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but

for all that he was radiant with freshness and health. In a

rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed with health and

freshness. "Yes, he is happy and content!" she thought; "while

I.... And that disgusting good nature, which every one likes him

for and praises--I hate that good nature of his," she thought.

Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the

right side of her pale, nervous face.




Most Popular