Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that
was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even
expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light
peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his
feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his
slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine
years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place
where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he
suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in
his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his
brows.

“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had
happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was
present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and
worst of all, his own fault.

“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most
awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m
not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the
acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.

Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and
good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his
wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise
had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her
bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,
and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still
with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of
horror, despair, and indignation.

“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.

And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case,

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