have touched her face.

"What is the matter?" I asked. "What harm have I done all at once?"

Her chin quivered, she hastily wiped her eyes, and, with a cursory
glance at the looking-glass, whispered:

"The old story is beginning all over again. Of course you won't go away.
Well, do as you like. I'll go away myself, and you stay."

We returned to the drawing-room, she with a resolute face, while
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to smile. There were some more
visitors--an elderly lady and a young man in spectacles. Without
greeting the new arrivals or taking leave of the others, I went off to
my own rooms.

After what had happened at tea and then again downstairs, it became
clear to me that our "family happiness," which we had begun to forget
about in the course of the last two years, was through some absurd and
trivial reason beginning all over again, and that neither I nor my
wife could now stop ourselves; and that next day or the day after, the
outburst of hatred would, as I knew by experience of past years, be
followed by something revolting which would upset the whole order of our
lives. "So it seems that during these two years we have grown no wiser,
colder, or calmer," I thought as I began walking about the rooms. "So
there will again be tears, outcries, curses, packing up, going abroad,
then the continual sickly fear that she will disgrace me with some
coxcomb out there, Italian or Russian, refusing a passport, letters,
utter loneliness, missing her, and in five years old age, grey hairs."
I walked about, imagining what was really impossible--her, grown