Ananvev flushed crimson and paused. He walked up and down near the
table in silence, scratched the back of his head with an air of
vexation, and several times shrugged his shoulders and twitched his
shoulder-blades, while a shiver ran down his huge back. The memory
was painful and made him ashamed, and he was struggling with himself.

"It's horrible!" he said, draining a glass of wine and shaking his
head. "I am told that in every introductory lecture on women's
diseases the medical students are admonished to remember that each
one of them has a mother, a sister, a fiancée, before undressing
and examining a female patient. . . . That advice would be very
good not only for medical students but for everyone who in one way
or another has to deal with a woman's life. Now that I have a wife
and a little daughter, oh, how well I understand that advice! How
I understand it, my God! You may as well hear the rest, though. . . .
As soon as she had become my mistress, Kisotchka's view of the
position was very different from mine. First of all she felt for
me a deep and passionate love. What was for me an ordinary amatory
episode was for her an absolute revolution in her life. I remember,
it seemed to me that she had gone out of her mind. Happy for the
first time in her life, looking five years younger, with an inspired
enthusiastic face, not knowing what to do with herself for happiness,
she laughed and cried and never ceased dreaming aloud how next day
we would set off for the Caucasus, then in the autumn to Petersburg;
how we would live afterwards.

"'Don't worry yourself about my husband,' she said to reassure me.
'He is bound to give me a divorce. Everyone in the town knows that
he is living with the elder Kostovitch. We will get a divorce and
be married.'