p languidly and dragged herself
to her bedroom. Andrey Ilyitch was already in bed. She sat down by
the open window and gave herself up to desire. There was no "tangle"
now in her head; all her thoughts and feelings were bent with one
accord upon a single aim. She tried to struggle against it, but
instantly gave it up. . . . She understood now how strong and
relentless was the foe. Strength and fortitude were needed to combat
him, and her birth, her education, and her life had given her nothing
to fall back upon.

"Immoral wretch! Low creature!" she nagged at herself for her
weakness. "So that's what you're like!"

Her outraged sense of propriety was moved to such indignation by
this weakness that she lavished upon herself every term of abuse
she knew, and told herself many offensive and humiliating truths.
So, for instance, she told herself that she never had been moral,
that she had not come to grief before simply because she had had
no opportunity, that her inward conflict during that day had all
been a farce. . . .

"And even if I have struggled," she thought, "what sort of struggle
was it? Even the woman who sells herself struggles before she brings
herself to it, and yet she sells herself. A fine struggle! Like
milk, I've turned in a day! In one day!"

She convicted herself of being tempted, not by feeling, not by Ilyin
personally, but by sensations which awaited her . . . an idle lady,
having her fling in the summer holidays, like so many!

"'Like an unfledged bird when the mother has been slain,'" sang
a husky tenor outside the window.

"If I am to go, it's time," thought Sofya Petrovna. Her heart
suddenly began beating violently.

"Andrey!" she almost shrieked. "Listen! we . . . we are going? Yes?"

"Yes, I've told you already: you go alone."

"But listen," she began. "If you don't go with me, you are in danger
of losing me. I believe I am . . . in love already."

"With whom?" asked Andrey Ilyitch.

"It can't make any difference to you who it is!" cried Sofya Petrovna.

Andrey Ilyitch sat up with his feet out of bed and looked wonderingly
at his wife's dark figure.

"It's a fancy!" he yawned.

He did not believe her, but yet he was frightened. After thinking
a little and asking his wife several unimportant questions, he
delivered himself of his opinions on the family, on infidelity . . .
spoke listlessly for about ten minutes and got into bed again.
His moralizing produced no effect. There are