Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/398

 sister's? It would be stupid to go there to ask. Well, if she wants to torment me, let her, too, be tormented. That is what she is waiting for. The next time it will be only worse. What if she is not at her sister's, but is doing or has already done something to herself? Eleven o'clock, twelve. I do not go to the sleeping-room,—it is stupid to lie there alone and wait,—I will lie down here. I want to busy myself with something, to write a letter, to read; but I am not able to do anything. I sit alone in my cabinet, and worry, and am angry, and listen. Three o'clock, four o'clock,—she is not back yet. Toward morning I fall asleep. I awake,—she is not back.

"Everything in the house goes as of old, but all are perplexed, and all look interrogatively and reproachfully at me, assuming that it is all my fault. Within me is the same struggle,—fury because she torments me so, and anxiety on her account.

"At about eleven o'clock in the morning her sister comes as her messenger to me, and there begins the customary: 'She is in a terrible state. What can it be? Nothing has happened?' I speak of the impossibility of her disposition, and say that I have not done anything.

"'It cannot remain as it is,' says her sister.

"'It is all her doing, not mine,' I say. 'I will not make the first step. If we are to separate, well and good!'

"My sister-in-law goes away without having accomplished anything. I said boldly that I would not make the first step; but the moment she is gone and I go out and see the poor, frightened children, I am ready to make the first step. I should like to make it, but I do not know how. Again I walk around, I smoke, I drink brandy and wine at breakfast, and I reach the point which I unconsciously wish: I do not see the stupidity and meanness of my situation.

"About three o'clock she returns. She says nothing