trunks, the sound of weeping reached me through the
floor.

"Are you a kammer-junker?" a voice whispered in my ear. "That's a very
pleasant thing. But yet you are a reptile."

"It's all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense," I muttered as I went
downstairs. "Nonsense... and it's nonsense, too, that I am actuated
by vanity or a love of display.... What rubbish! Am I going to get a
decoration for working for the peasants or be made the director of a
department? Nonsense, nonsense! And who is there to show off to here in
the country?"

I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering in my
ear: "Very pleasant. But, still, you are a reptile." For some reason I
remembered a line out of an old poem I knew as a child: "How pleasant it
is to be good!"

My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on her face and
with her hands clutching her head. She was crying. A maid was standing
beside her with a perplexed and frightened face. I sent the maid away,
laid the papers on the table, thought a moment and said:

"Here are all your papers, Natalie. It's all in order, it's all capital,
and I am very much pleased. I am going away tomorrow."

She went on crying. I went into the drawing-room and sat there in the
dark. My wife's sobs, her sighs, accused me of something, and to justify
myself I remembered the whole of our quarrel, starting from my unhappy
idea of inviting my wife to our consultation and ending with the
exercise books and these tears. It was an ordinary attack of our
conjugal hatred, senseless and unseemly, such as had been frequent
during our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do with
it? How could it have happened that they had become a bone of
contention between us? It was just as though pursuing one another we had
accidentally run up to the altar and had carried on a quarrel there.

"Natalie," I said softly from the drawing-room, "hush, hush!"

To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of
affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed
her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me?
How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity and hating me,
that it was dear to me, and that I felt for its sufferings? I had never
known my wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to
talk about. Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as it
deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her