an effort to master himself, took leave of
her with his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound
him to nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his
decision.

His wife's words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a
cruel pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was
intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set
up by her tears. But when he was all alone in the carriage
Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight, felt complete
relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of
jealousy.

He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out
after suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a
sense of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn
out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own
good luck, feels all at once that what has so long poisoned his
existence and enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that
he can live and think again, and take interest in other things
besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was
experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible, but now
it was over; he felt that he could live again and think of
something other than his wife.

"No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always
knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to
spare her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him
that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past
life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before--now
these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt
woman. "I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there
was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.
It's not I that am to blame," he told himself, "but she. But I
have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me..."

Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his
sentiments were as much changed as towards her, ceased to
interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the
question of in what way he could best, with most propriety and
comfort for himself, and thus with most justice, extricate
himself from the mud with which she had spattered him in her
fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and
useful existence.

"I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman
has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of
the difficult pos