Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/202

 such a rage that she understood that this was a morbid condition which expressed itself in him whenever he partook of food, so she calmed herself, ceased to be irritated, and merely hastened to finish the meal as soon as possible. Praskov'ya Thedorovna made a very great merit of her meekness. Having arrived at the conclusion that her husband had a frightful temper, and was making her life wretched, she began to pity herself. And the more she pitied herself, the more she hated her husband. She began to wish that he would die, but she could not wish this because then there would be no salary. And this irritated her still more against him. She accounted herself dreadfully miserable, principally because even his death would be no deliverance for her, and it irritated her to conceal this feeling, and this hidden irritation still further increased her irritation at him.

After one of these scenes, in which Ivan Il'ich had been particularly unjust, and after which he said, by way of explanation, that he had certainly been irritable, but that it was because he did not feel well, she said to him that if he were ill he ought to be cured, and insisted that he should go and see a famous doctor.

He went. Everything turned out just as he had expected, everything was as it always is. And the expectation and the intrinsic importance of the doctor, an acquaintance of his, was the same sort of thing which he knew by experience in the Courts, and the tapping and the auscultations, and the questions, demanding foregone and obviously unnecessary answers, and the doctor's look of importance,