In January, just as now, he did not go away, but stayed at
Pekarsky's, and I saw him every day and took part in the deception.
He was weary of you, he hated your presence here, he mocked at you
. . . . If you could have heard how he and his friends here jeered
at you and your love, you would not have remained here one minute!
Go away from here! Go away."

"Well," she said in a shaking voice, and moved her hand over her
hair. "Well, so be it."

Her eyes were full of tears, her lips were quivering, and her whole
face was strikingly pale and distorted with anger. Orlov's coarse,
petty lying revolted her and seemed to her contemptible, ridiculous:
she smiled and I did not like that smile.

"Well," she repeated, passing her hand over her hair again, "so be
it. He imagines that I shall die of humiliation, and instead of
that I am . . . amused by it. There's no need for him to hide." She
walked away from the piano and said, shrugging her shoulders:
"There's no need. . . . It would have been simpler to have it out
with me instead of keeping in hiding in other people's flats. I
have eyes; I saw it myself long ago. . . . I was only waiting for
him to come back to have things out once for all."

Then she sat down on a low chair by the table, and, leaning her
head on the arm of the sofa, wept bitterly. In the drawing-room
there was only one candle burning in the candelabra, and the chair
where she was sitting was in darkness; but I saw how her head and
shoulders were quivering, and how her hair, escaping from her combs,
covered her neck, her face, her arms. . . . Her quiet, steady
weeping, which was not hysterical but a woman's ordinary weeping,
expressed a sense of insult, of wounded pride, of injury, and of
something helpless, hopeless, which one could not set right and to
which one could not get used. Her tears stirred an echo in my
troubled and suffering heart; I forgot my illness and everything
else in the world; I walked about the drawing-room and muttered
distractedly:

"Is this life? . . . Oh, one can't go on living like this, one
can't. . . . Oh, it's madness, wickedness, not life."

"What humiliation!" she said through her tears. "To live together,
to smile at me at the very time when I was burdensome to him,
ridiculous in his eyes! Oh, how humiliating!"

She lifted up her head, and looking at me with tear-stained eyes
through her hair, wet with her tears, and pushing it back as it
prevented her seeing me, she a