When Alexei Alexandrovich had decided to himself that he ought to have a talk with his wife, it had seemed an easy and simple thing to him; but now, as he began to think over this newly arisen circumstance, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.
Alexei Alexandrovich was not a jealous man. Jealousy, in his opinion, was insulting to a wife, and a man ought to have trust in his wife. Why he ought to have trust - that is, complete assurance that his young wife would always love him - he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, because he had trust and told himself that he had to have it. But now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to have trust was not destroyed, he felt that he stood face to face with something illogical and senseless, and he did not know what to do. Alexei Alexandrovich stood face to face with life, confronting the possibility of his wife loving someone else besides him, and it was this that seemed so senseless and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. All his life Alexei Alexandrovich had lived and worked in spheres of service that dealt with reflections of life. And each time he had encountered life itself, he had drawn back from it. Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep. This bottomless deep was life itself, the bridge the artificial life that Alexei Alexandrovich had lived. For the first time questions came to him about the possibility of his wife falling in love with someone, and he was horrified at them.
Without undressing, he paced with his even step up and down the resounding parquet floor of the dining room lit by a single lamp, over the carpet in the dark drawing room, where light was reflected only from the large, recently painted portrait of himself that hung over the sofa, and through her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting the portraits of her relations and lady-friends, and the beautiful knick-knacks on her desk, long intimately familiar to him. Passing through her room he reached the door of the bedroom and turned back again.
At each section of his walk, and most often on the parquet of the lamp-lit dining room, he stopped and said to himself: ‘Yes, it is necessary to resolve this and stop it, to express my view of it and my resolution.’ And he turned back. ‘But express what? What resolution?’ he said to himself in the drawing room, and found no answer. ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society. And besides, to be jealous means to humiliate both myself and her,’ he told himself, going into her boudoir; but this reasoning, which used to have such weight for him, now weighed nothing and meant nothing. And from the bedroom door he turned back to the main room; but as soon as he entered the dark drawing room again, some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something. And again he said to himself in the dining room: ‘Yes, it is necessary to resolve this and stop it and to express my view ...’ And again in the drawing room, before turning back, he asked himself: resolve it how? And then asked himself, what had happened? And answered: nothing, and remembered that jealousy was a feeling humiliating for a wife, but again in the drawing room he was convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his body, completed a full circle without encountering anything new. He noticed it, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.
Here, looking at her desk with the malachite blotter and an unfinished letter lying on it, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began thinking about her, about what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes, and the thought that she could and should have her own particular life seemed so frightening to him that he hastened to drive it away. It was that bottomless deep into which it was frightening to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental act alien to Alexei Alexandrovich. He regarded this mental act as harmful and dangerous fantasizing.
‘And most terrible of all,’ he thought, ‘is that precisely now, when my work is coming to a conclusion’ (he was thinking of the project he was putting through), ‘when I need all my calm and all my inner forces, this senseless anxiety falls upon me. But what am I to do? I’m not one of those people who suffer troubles and anxieties and have no strength to look them in the face.’
‘I must think it over, resolve it and cast it aside,’ he said aloud.
