“Ah, ah, ah!  Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had happened.  And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.

“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me.  And the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—­all my fault, though I’m not to blame.  That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.  “Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.

Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details, and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indignation.

“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.

And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he had met his wife’s words.

There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful.  He did not succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed towards his wife by the discovery of his fault.  Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining indifferent even—­anything would have been better than what he did do—­his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—­utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.

This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself.  Catching sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the room.  Since then she had refused to see her husband.

“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“But what’s to be done?  What’s to be done?” he said to himself in despair, and found no answer.

Chapter 2