the past, struck him now as repulsive and
hateful.

"They are such reptiles!" he thought.

And his wife's face, too, struck him as repulsive and hateful. Anger
surged up in his heart against her, and he thought malignantly:

"She knows nothing about money, and so she is stingy. If she won it she
would give me a hundred roubles, and put the rest away under lock and
key."

And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred. She
glanced at him too, and also with hatred and anger. She had her own
daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she understood perfectly
well what her husband's dreams were. She knew who would be the first to
try and grab her winnings.

"It's very nice making daydreams at other people's expense!" is what her
eyes expressed. "No, don't you dare!"

Her husband understood her look; hatred began stirring again in his
breast, and in order to annoy his wife he glanced quickly, to spite her
at the fourth page on the newspaper and read out triumphantly:

"Series 9,499, number 46! Not 26!"

Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began immediately to
seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their rooms were dark and small
and low-pitched, that the supper they had been eating was not doing them
good, but lying heavy on their stomachs, that the evenings were long and
wearisome....

"What the devil's the meaning of it?" said Ivan Dmitritch, beginning to
be ill-humoured. "Wherever one steps there are bits of paper under one's
feet, crumbs, husks. The rooms are never swept! One is simply forced to
go out. Damnation take my soul entirely! I shall go and hang myself on
the first aspen-tree!"

End of Project Gutenberg's The Wife and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov

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