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talk to his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter.
But now, when he began to think over the question that had just
presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his
notions was an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in
one’s wife. Why one ought to have confidence— that is to say, com-
plete conviction that his young wife would always love him—he did
not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, be-
cause he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have
it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and
that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he
was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and
did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was stand-
ing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving some-
one other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and
incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey
Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do
with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life
itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin
to that of a man who, wile calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge,
should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a
chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in
which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question
presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone
else, and he was horrified at it.
He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular
tread over the resounding parquet of the dining room, where one lamp
was burning, over the carpet of the dark drawing room, in which the
light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself handing over the
sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the
portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks
of her writing table, that he knew so well. He walked across her bou-
doir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his
walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining room, he halted
and said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must
express my view of it and my decision.” And he turned back again.
“But express what—what decision?” he said to himself in the drawing
room, and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before
turning into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talk-
ing a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society
can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both
myself and her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this
dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now
no weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he
turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing room some
inner voice told him that it was not so, and that if others noticed it that
showed that there was something. And he said to himself again in the
dining room, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my
view of it...” And again at the turn in the drawing room he asked
himself, “Decide how?” And again he asked himself, “What had
occurred?” and answered, “Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was
a feeling insulting to his wife; but again in the drawing room he was
convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his body,
went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He
noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.
There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at
the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He
began to think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the first