e, but where? Where could I take
her? It would have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful,
interesting life--if, for instance, I had been struggling for the
emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science,
an artist or a painter; but as it was it would mean taking her from one
everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. And how
long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was
ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?

"And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her
husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved the husband like a
son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings she would have to lie,
or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been
equally terrible and inconvenient. And she was tormented by the question
whether her love would bring me happiness--would she not complicate
my life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of
trouble? She fancied she was not young enough for me, that she was not
industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often
talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of
intelligence and merit who would be a capable housewife and a help to
me--and she would immediately add that it would be difficult to find
such a girl in the whole town.

"Meanwhile the years were passing. Anna Alexyevna already had two
children. When I arrived at the Luganovitchs' the servants smiled
cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinovitch
had come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did not
understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I, too, was
happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and
children alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms,
and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner towards me, as though
in my presence their life, too, was purer and more beautiful. Anna
Alexyevna and I used to go to the theatre together, always walking
there; we used to sit side by side in the stalls, our shoulders
touching. I would take the opera-glass from her hands without a word,
and feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we
could not live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding,
when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and parted as
though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were sayin