et, and
then that same face pale, quivering, and suffering, as it had been when
he reeled and sank on the snow.

"What has happened?" he asked himself. "I have killed her lover, yes,
killed my wife's lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come to do
it?"--"Because you married her," answered an inner voice.

"But in what was I to blame?" he asked. "In marrying her without loving
her; in deceiving yourself and her." And he vividly recalled that moment
after supper at Prince Vasili's, when he spoke those words he had found
so difficult to utter: "I love you." "It all comes from that! Even then
I felt it," he thought. "I felt then that it was not so, that I had no
right to do it. And so it turns out."

He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection.
Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of
how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his
study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head
steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at
his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful
understanding of his employer's happiness.

"But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic beauty
and social tact," thought he; "been proud of my house, in which she
received all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and beauty. So
this is what I was proud of! I then thought that I did not understand
her. How often when considering her character I have told myself that
I was to blame for not understanding her, for not understanding that
constant composure and complacency and lack of all interests or desires,
and the whole secret lies in the terrible truth that she is a depraved
woman. Now I have spoken that terrible word to myself all has become
clear.

"Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss her
naked shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself be
kissed. Her father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she replied
with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: 'Let him
do what he pleases,' she used to say of me. One day I asked her if she
felt any symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she
was not a fool to want to have children, and that she was not going to
have any children by me."

Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and the
vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, tho