ould you live here and waste your golden days? You are
young, wealthy, and healthy.... Yes.... Ah, if I were younger I would
whisk away like a hare, and snap my fingers at everything."

III

My wife's outburst reminded me of our married life together. In old days
after every such outburst we felt irresistibly drawn to each other;
we would meet and let off all the dynamite that had accumulated in our
souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone away I had a strong impulse
to go to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her
behaviour at tea had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty,
and that her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what
_I_ was saying and of what _I_ was doing. I walked about the rooms a
long time thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what
she would say to me.

That evening, after Ivan Ivanitch went away, I felt in a peculiarly
irritating form the uneasiness which had worried me of late. I could
not sit down or sit still, but kept walking about in the rooms that were
lighted up and keeping near to the one in which Marya Gerasimovna was
sitting. I had a feeling very much like that which I had on the North
Sea during a storm when every one thought that our ship, which had no
freight nor ballast, would overturn. And that evening I understood that
my uneasiness was not disappointment, as I had supposed, but a different
feeling, though what exactly I could not say, and that irritated me more
than ever.

"I will go to her," I decided. "I can think of a pretext. I shall say
that I want to see Ivan Ivanitch; that will be all."

I went downstairs and walked without haste over the carpeted floor
through the vestibule and the hall. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting on the
sofa in the drawing-room; he was drinking tea again and muttering
something. My wife was standing opposite to him and holding on to the
back of a chair. There was a gentle, sweet, and docile expression on her
face, such as one sees on the faces of people listening to crazy saints
or holy men when a peculiar hidden significance is imagined in their
vague words and mutterings. There was something morbid, something of
a nun's exaltation, in my wife's expression and attitude; and her
low-pitched, half-dark rooms with their old-fashioned furniture, with
her birds asleep in their cages, and with a smell of geranium, reminded
me of the rooms of some abbess or pious old lady.

I went into the drawing-r