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wrong would mean irritating her still more and making the rupture
greater that was the cause of all his suffering. One habitual feeling
impelled him to get rid of the blame and to pass it on her. Another
feeling, even stronger, impelled him as quickly as possible to smooth
over the rupture without letting it grow greater. To remain under such
undeserved reproach was wretched, but to make her suffer by justify-
ing himself was worse still. Like a man half-awake in an agony of pain,
he wanted to tear out, to fling away the aching place, and coming to his
senses, he felt that the aching place was himself. He could do nothing
but try to help the aching place to bear it, and this he tried to do.
They made peace. She, recognizing that she was wrong, though
she did not say so, became tenderer to him, and they experienced new,
redoubled happiness in their love. But that did not prevent such
quarrels from happening again, and exceedingly often too, on the most
unexpected and trivial grounds. These quarrels frequently arose from
the fact that they did not yet know what was of importance to each
other and that all this early period they were both often in a bad
temper. When one was in a good temper, and the other in a bad
temper, the peace was not broken; but when both happened to be in
an ill-humor, quarrels sprang up from such incomprehensibly trifling
causes, that they could never remember afterwards what they had
quarreled about. It is true that when they were both in a good temper
their enjoyment of life was redoubled. But still this first period of their
married life was a difficult time for them.
During all this early time they had a peculiarly vivid sense of ten-
sion, as it were, a tugging in opposite directions of the chain by which
they were bound. Altogether their honeymoon—that is to say, the
month after their wedding—from which from tradition Levin expected
so much, was not merely not a time of sweetness, but remained in the
memories of both as the bitterest and most humiliating period in their
lives. They both alike tried in later life to blot out from their memories
all the monstrous, shameful incidents of that morbid period, when both
were rarely in a normal frame of mind, both were rarely quite them-
selves.
It was only in the third month of their married life, after their return
from Moscow, where they had been staying for a month, that their life
began to go more smoothly.