Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/367

 venomous words she began to upbraid me for my egotism and cruelty.

"I looked at her. Her countenance expressed complete coldness and hostility, almost hatred of me. I remember how frightened I was when I saw this. 'What is this?' I thought. 'Love is the union of souls, and this has come in place of it! This cannot be, that is not she!' I tried to appease her, but I ran up against such an insuperable wall of coldness and venomous hostility that before I had time to look around, the irritation took possession of me, too, and we told each other a mass of unpleasant things. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I called it a quarrel, but it was not a quarrel; it was a manifestation of the abyss which was in reality between us. The infatuation was exhausted by the gratification of sensuality, and we were left in our real relations to each other, that is, two mutually strange egotists, who wished to derive as much pleasure from each other as was possible. I called that a quarrel which had taken place between us; it was not a quarrel,—it was only the result of an interrupted sensuality which laid bare our real relations to each other. I did not understand that this cold and hostile attitude was our normal relation; I did not understand it because the hostile relation was in the beginning soon veiled from us by a new access of fleeting sensuality, that is, by infatuation.

"I thought that we had quarreled and made up, and that it would never happen again. But even during this same honeymoon there again was reached a period of satiety, again we ceased to be useful to each other, and another quarrel took place. The second quarrel impressed me even more than the first. 'It appears that the first quarrel was not an accident, but that it must be so and always will be so,' I thought.

"The second quarrel struck me the more forcibly because it had its rise in an absolutely impossible cause,