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gained special poignancy from certain other considerations. She asked
him about the races. He answered her questions, and, seeing that she
was agitated, trying to calm her, he began telling her in the simplest
tone the details of his preparations for the races.
“Tell him or not tell him?” she thought, looking into his quiet, affec-
tionate eyes. “He is so happy, so absorbed in his races that he won’t
understand as he ought, he won’t understand all the gravity of this fact
to us.”
“But you haven’t told me what you were thinking of when I came
in,” he said, interrupting his narrative; “please tell me!”
She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked
inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under their
long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had picked.
He saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection, that slavish
devotion, which had done so much to win her.
“I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at
peace, knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God’s
sake,” he repeated imploringly.
“Yes, I shan’t be able to forgive him if he does not realize all the
gravity of it. Better not tell; why put him to the proof?” she thought, still
staring at him in the same way, and feeling the hand that held the leaf
was trembling more and more.
“For God’s sake!” he repeated, taking her hand.
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes, yes, yes.. .”
“I’m with child,” she said, softly and deliberately. The leaf in her
hand shook more violently, but she did not take her eyes off him,
watching how he would take it. He turned white, would have said
something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head sank on
his breast. “Yes, he realizes all the gravity of it,” she thought, and
gratefully she pressed his hand.
But she was mistaken in thinking he realized the gravity of the fact
as she, a woman, realized it. On hearing it, he felt come upon him with
tenfold intensity that strange feeling of loathing of someone. But at
the same time, he felt that the turning-point he had been longing for
had come now; that it was impossible to go on concealing things from
her husband, and it was inevitable in one way or another that they
should soon put an end to their unnatural position. But, besides that,
her emotion physically affected him in the same way. He looked at her
with a look of submissive tenderness, kissed her hand, got up, and, in
silence, paced up and down the terrace.
“Yes,” he said, going up to her resolutely. “Neither you nor I have
looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our fate is
sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end”—he looked round as
he spoke—”to the deception in which we are living.”
“Put an end? How put an end, Alexey?” she said softly.
She was calmer now, and her face lighted up with a tender smile.
“Leave your husband and make our life one.”
“It is one as it is,” she answered, scarcely audibly.
“Yes, but altogether; altogether.”
“But how, Alexey, tell me how?” she said in melancholy mockery at
the hopelessness of her own position. “Is there any way out of such a
position? Am I not the wife of my husband?”
“There is a way out of every position. We must take our line,” he
said. “Anything’s better than the position in which you’re living. Of
course, I see how you torture yourself over everything—the world and
your son and your husband.”
“Oh, not over my husband,” she said, with a quiet smile. “I don’t