the journey. Varvara Nikolaevna had some tea, went to bed and was
soon asleep. But Kovrin did not go to bed. An hour before starting
for the station, he had received a letter from Tanya, and had not
brought himself to open it, and now it was lying in his coat pocket,
and the thought of it excited him disagreeably. At the bottom of
his heart he genuinely considered now that his marriage to Tanya
had been a mistake. He was glad that their separation was final,
and the thought of that woman who in the end had turned into a
living relic, still walking about though everything seemed dead in
her except her big, staring, intelligent eyes--the thought of her
roused in him nothing but pity and disgust with himself. The
handwriting on the envelope reminded him how cruel and unjust he
had been two years before, how he had worked off his anger at his
spiritual emptiness, his boredom, his loneliness, and his dissatisfaction
with life by revenging himself on people in no way to blame. He
remembered, also, how he had torn up his dissertation and all the
articles he had written during his illness, and how he had thrown
them out of window, and the bits of paper had fluttered in the wind
and caught on the trees and flowers. In every line of them he saw
strange, utterly groundless pretension, shallow defiance, arrogance,
megalomania; and they made him feel as though he were reading a
description of his vices. But when the last manuscript had been
torn up and sent flying out of window, he felt, for some reason,
suddenly bitter and angry; he went to his wife and said a great
many unpleasant things to her. My God, how he had tormented her!
One day, wanting to cause her pain, he told her that her father had
played a very unattractive part in their romance, that he had asked
him to marry her. Yegor Semyonitch accidentally overheard this, ran
into the room, and, in his despair, could not utter a word, could
only stamp and make a strange, bellowing sound as though he had