Don Quixote

me, but I want to hear it from
you: tell me all about it."
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were apparent on Anna's face.
"Very well," she suddenly said. "But I will begin at the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education maman gave
us I was more than innocent- I was foolish. I knew nothing. They
say, I know, men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva"-
she corrected herself- "Stepan Arkadyevich told me nothing. You'll
hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman
he had known. So I lived eight years. You must understand that I was
not only far from suspecting infidelity, but I regarded it as
impossible, and then- try to imagine it- with such conceptions to find
out suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness... You must try and
understand me. To be fully convinced of one's happiness, and all at
once..." continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, "To get a letter...
His letter to his mistress, a governess in my employ. No, it's too
awful!" She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in
it. "I can understand if it were passion," she went on, after a
brief silence, "but to deceive me deliberately, slyly... And with
whom?... To go on being my husband while he and she... It's awful! You
can't understand..."
"Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do
understand," said Anna, pressing her hand.
{PART_ONE|CHAPTER_XIX ^paragraph 30}
"And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?
Dolly resumed. "Not in the slightest! He's happy and contented."
"Oh, no!" Anna interposed quickly. "He's to be pitied, he's
weighed down by remorse..."
"Is he capable of remorse?" Dolly interrupted, gazing intently
into her sister-in-law's face.
"Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry
for him. We both know him. He's good-natured, but he's proud, and
now he's so humiliated. What touched me most..." (And here Anna
guessed what would touch Dolly most.) "He's tortured by two things:
that he's ashamed for the children's sake, and that, loving you-
yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth," she hurriedly
interrupted Dolly, who would have rejoined- "he has hurt you,
pierced you to the heart. 'No, no, she cannot forgive me,' he keeps on
saying."
Dolly looked pensively past her sister-in-law as she listened to her
words.
{PART_ONE|CHAPTER_XIX ^paragraph 35}
"Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it's worse for the
guilty than the innocent," she said, "if he feels that all the
misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I
to be his wife again after her? For me to live with him now would be
torture, just because I love my past love for him..."
And sobs cut short her words.
But as though of set design, each time she was softened she began to
speak again