“Yes, I must go away,” I decided at last, feeling utterly exhausted.  “As far as possible from these agreeable impressions!  I will set off tomorrow.”

I gathered together the papers and exercise books, and went down to my wife.  As, feeling quite worn out and shattered, I held the papers and the exercise books to my breast with both hands, and passing through my bedroom saw my trunks, the sound of weeping reached me through the floor.

“Are you a kammer-junker?” a voice whispered in my ear.  “That’s a very pleasant thing.  But yet you are a reptile.”

“It’s all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” I muttered as I went downstairs.  “Nonsense... and it’s nonsense, too, that I am actuated by vanity or a love of display....  What rubbish!  Am I going to get a decoration for working for the peasants or be made the director of a department?  Nonsense, nonsense!  And who is there to show off to here in the country?”

I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering in my ear:  “Very pleasant.  But, still, you are a reptile.”  For some reason I remembered a line out of an old poem I knew as a child:  “How pleasant it is to be good!”

My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on her face and with her hands clutching her head.  She was crying.  A maid was standing beside her with a perplexed and frightened face.  I sent the maid away, laid the papers on the table, thought a moment and said: 

“Here are all your papers, Natalie.  It’s all in order, it’s all capital, and I am very much pleased.  I am going away tomorrow.”

She went on crying.  I went into the drawing-room and sat there in the dark.  My wife’s sobs, her sighs, accused me of something, and to justify myself I remembered the whole of our quarrel, starting from my unhappy idea of inviting my wife to our consultation and ending with the exercise books and these tears.  It was an ordinary attack of our conjugal hatred, senseless and unseemly, such as had been frequent during our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do with it?  How could it have happened that they had become a bone of contention between us?  It was just as though pursuing one another we had accidentally run up to the altar and had carried on a quarrel there.

“Natalie,” I said softly from the drawing-room, “hush, hush!”

To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me?  How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity and hating me, that it was dear to me, and that I felt for its sufferings?  I had never known my wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to talk about.  Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as it deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life, her frequent changes of mood, her eyes full of hatred, her disdain,