“He has no right to do it!” she muttered, trying to formulate her jealousy and her vexation with her husband.  “He has no right at all.  I will tell him so plainly!”

She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about it:  it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to other women and sought their admiration as though it were some heavenly manna; it was unjust and dishonourable that he should give to others what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came across.  What harm had his wife done him?  How was she to blame?  Long ago she had been sickened by his lying:  he was for ever posing, flirting, saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he was and what he ought to be.  Why this falsity?  Was it seemly in a decent man?  If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and slighting what he lied about.  Could he not understand that if he swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on the prerogatives of Government, that he, simply to provoke her uncle, was showing thereby that he had not a ha’p’orth of respect for the Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking at him?

Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihalovna assumed an expression of face as though she had just gone away to look after some domestic matter.  In the verandah the gentlemen were drinking liqueur and eating strawberries:  one of them, the Examining Magistrate—­a stout elderly man, blagueur and wit—­must have been telling some rather free anecdote, for, seeing their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips, rolled his eyes, and sat down.  Olga Mihalovna did not like the local officials.  She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious wives, their scandal-mongering, their frequent visits, their flattery of her husband, whom they all hated.  Now, when they were drinking, were replete with food and showed no signs of going away, she felt their presence an agonizing weariness; but not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to the Magistrate, and shook her finger at him.  She walked across the dining-room and drawing-room smiling, and looking as though she had gone to give some order and make some arrangement.  “God grant no one stops me,” she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the drawing-room to listen from politeness to a young man who was sitting at the piano playing:  after standing for a minute, she cried, “Bravo, bravo, M. Georges!” and clapping her hands twice, she went on.

She found her husband in his study.  He was sitting at the table, thinking of something.  His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty.  This was not the same Pyotr Dmitritch who had been arguing at dinner and whom his guests knew, but a different man—­wearied, feeling guilty and dissatisfied with himself, whom nobody knew but his wife.  He must have come to the study to get cigarettes.  Before him lay an open cigarette-case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer; he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.