“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.

“Yes.  I know him.  I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him.  We both know him.  He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated.  What touched me most...” (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things:  that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—­yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—­“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart.  ’No, no, she cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”

Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to her words.

“Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty than the innocent,” she said, “if he feels that all the misery comes from his fault.  But how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife again after her?  For me to live with him now would be torture, just because I love my past love for him...”

And sobs cut short her words.  But as though of set design, each time she was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.

“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on.  “Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom?  By him and his children.  I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him.  No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent.  Do you understand?”

Again her eyes glowed with hatred.

“And after that he will tell me....  What! can I believe him?  Never!  No, everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my sufferings....  Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha just now:  once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture.  What have I to strive and toil for?  Why are the children here?  What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred.  I could kill him.”

“Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself.  You are so distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.”

Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.

“What’s to be done?  Think for me, Anna, help me.  I have thought over everything, and I see nothing.”

Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.

“One thing I would say,” began Anna.  “I am his sister, I know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she waved her hand before her forehead), “that faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting too.  He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”