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 t illness.

But this little indisposition happened to increase, and passed, not yet into downright illness, but into a feeling of constant oppression in the side, accompanied by lowness of spirits. This lowness of spirits kept on increasing and increasing, and began to destroy that easy, pleasant, and decorous manner of life which had become an institution in the family of the Golivins. The husband and wife began to wrangle more and more frequently, and soon all ease and pleasantness fell away from them, and decorum alone remained, and that was only preserved with the greatest difficulty. Scenes again became more and more frequent between them, and at last there were only rare occasions when the husband and wife could meet together without an open rupture. And Praskov'ya Thedorovna said, and now not without reason, that her husband was very difficult to get on with. With her customary habit of exaggeration, she maintained that he had always had a frightful temper, and that it was only her good nature that had enabled her to put up with it for these twenty years. It was true that now, at any rate, he was the first to begin to quarrel. His peevishness always began before dinner, and often, and especially just when he had begun to eat, after the soup, for instance. He would then remark that this dish or that was spoilt, and did not taste as it ought to taste, or his son would put his elbows on the table, or his daughter's hair was untidy. And he blamed Praskov'ya Thedorovna for everything. At first, Praskov'ya Thedorovna was offended, and said unpleasant things to him, but once or twice at the beginning of dinner he had flown into