Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/427

 into my cabinet, where I flung myself down on the divan and burst out into sobs.

"'I am an honest man, I am the son of my parents, I have all my life dreamt of the happiness of domestic life; I am a man who has never betrayed her— Here are five children, and she embraces a musician because he has red lips!

"'No, she is not a human being! She is a bitch, an abominable bitch! In the next room to her children, whom she has been pretending to love all her life. And to write to me what she did! So impudently to hang about his neck! How do I know but that it has been so all the time? Maybe the lackeys begot all the children whom I regard as my own!

"'I should have arrived on the morrow, and she, in her coiffure, with her waist and her indolent, graceful motions (I saw all her attractive, hateful face), would have met me, and the beast of jealousy would have for ever remained in my heart and would have lacerated it. What will the nurse think?— Egór— And poor Líza! She understands a little now. And that impudence! That lie! And that animal sensuality, which I know so well!' I said to myself.

"I wanted to get up, but I could not. My heart was beating so much that I could not stand on my feet. 'Yes, I shall die of apoplexy. She will kill me. That is what she wants. She wants to kill me! No, that would be too advantageous for her, and I will not afford her that pleasure. Here I am sitting, and they are eating and laughing there, and— Yes, although she is no longer in her first youth, he has not disdained her: she is not bad-looking, but, chiefly, she is safe for his precious health. Why did I not choke her then?' I said to myself, recalling the moment when, the week before, I drove her out of the cabinet and then hurled things at her. I vividly recalled the condition in which I then was; I not only