during our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do with
it? How could it have happened that they had become a bone of
contention between us? It was just as though pursuing one another we had
accidentally run up to the altar and had carried on a quarrel there.

"Natalie," I said softly from the drawing-room, "hush, hush!"

To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of
affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed
her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me?
How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity and hating me,
that it was dear to me, and that I felt for its sufferings? I had never
known my wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to
talk about. Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as it
deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life,
her frequent changes of mood, her eyes full of hatred, her disdain,
the scope and variety of her reading which sometimes struck me, or,
for instance, the nun-like expression I had seen on her face the day
before--all that was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When in my
collisions with her I tried to define what sort of a person she was,
my psychology went no farther than deciding that she was giddy,
impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine logic; and it seemed to
me that that was quite sufficient. But now that she was crying I had a
passionate desire to know more.

The weeping ceased. I went up to my wife. She sat up on the couch, and,
with her head propped in both hands, looked fixedly and dreamily at the
fire.

"I am going away tomorrow morning," I said.