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

hanging 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

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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 desires, and the idea that she

could and should have a separate life of her own seemed to him so

alarming that he made haste to dispel it. It was the chasm which

he was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought and

feeling in another person's place was a spiritual exercise not

natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual

exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.




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