a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he
was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his
head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult
even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why
lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her,
of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted
the murderer.

"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and
fro, looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:

"Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"

He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.

"To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid," he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in
order to put on his high boots. "Love and hatred are not under our
control. As for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of
the causes of his death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in
love with his wife and she with me?"

Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day