“Is some one staying the night?” she asked.

“Yegorov.”

Pyotr Dmitritch undressed and got into his bed.

Without speaking, he lighted a cigarette, and he, too, fell to watching the fly.  There was an uneasy and forbidding look in his eyes.  Olga Mihalovna looked at his handsome profile for five minutes in silence.  It seemed to her for some reason that if her husband were suddenly to turn facing her, and to say, “Olga, I am unhappy,” she would cry or laugh, and she would be at ease.  She fancied that her legs were aching and her body was uncomfortable all over because of the strain on her feelings.

“Pyotr, what are you thinking of?” she said.

“Oh, nothing . . .” her husband answered.

“You have taken to having secrets from me of late:  that’s not right.”

“Why is it not right?” answered Pyotr Dmitritch drily and not at once.  “We all have our personal life, every one of us, and we are bound to have our secrets.”

“Personal life, our secrets . . . that’s all words!  Understand you are wounding me!” said Olga Mihalovna, sitting up in bed.  “If you have a load on your heart, why do you hide it from me?  And why do you find it more suitable to open your heart to women who are nothing to you, instead of to your wife?  I overheard your outpourings to Lubotchka by the bee-house to-day.”

“Well, I congratulate you.  I am glad you did overhear it.”

This meant “Leave me alone and let me think.”  Olga Mihalovna was indignant.  Vexation, hatred, and wrath, which had been accumulating within her during the whole day, suddenly boiled over; she wanted at once to speak out, to hurt her husband without putting it off till to-morrow, to wound him, to punish him. . . .  Making an effort to control herself and not to scream, she said: 

“Let me tell you, then, that it’s all loathsome, loathsome, loathsome!  I’ve been hating you all day; you see what you’ve done.”

Pyotr Dmitritch, too, got up and sat on the bed.

“It’s loathsome, loathsome, loathsome,” Olga Mihalovna went on, beginning to tremble all over.  “There’s no need to congratulate me; you had better congratulate yourself!  It’s a shame, a disgrace.  You have wrapped yourself in lies till you are ashamed to be alone in the room with your wife!  You are a deceitful man!  I see through you and understand every step you take!”

“Olya, I wish you would please warn me when you are out of humour.  Then I will sleep in the study.”

Saying this, Pyotr Dmitritch picked up his pillow and walked out of the bedroom.  Olga Mihalovna had not foreseen this.  For some minutes she remained silent with her mouth open, trembling all over and looking at the door by which her husband had gone out, and trying to understand what it meant.  Was this one of the devices to which deceitful people have recourse when they are in the wrong, or was it a deliberate insult aimed at her pride?  How was she to take it?  Olga Mihalovna remembered her cousin, a lively young officer, who often used to tell her, laughing, that when “his spouse nagged at him” at night, he usually picked up his pillow and went whistling to spend the night in his study, leaving his wife in a foolish and ridiculous position.  This officer was married to a rich, capricious, and foolish woman whom he did not respect but simply put up with.