CHAPTER II
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a sincere man as far as he himself was concerned. He could not practise self-deception and persuade himself that he repented of his behavior. He could not, as yet, feel sorry that he, a handsome, susceptible man of four and thirty, was not now in love with his wife, the mother of his five living and two buried children, though she was only a year his junior. He regretted only that he had not succeeded in hiding it better from her. But he felt the whole weight of his situation and pitied his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he would have had better success in hiding his peccadilloes from his wife had he realized that this knowledge would have had such an effect upon her. He had never before thought clearly of this question, but he had a dim idea that his wife had long been aware that he was not faithful to her, and looked at it through her fingers. As she had lost her freshness, was beginning to look old, was no longer pretty and far from distinguished and entirely common-place, though she was an excellent mother of a family, he had thought that she would allow her innate sense of justice to plead for him. But it had proved to be quite the contrary.
"Akh, how wretched! aï! aï! aï! how wretched!" said Prince Stepan to himself over and over and could not find any way out of the difficulty. "And how well everything was going until this happened! How delightfully we lived! She was content, happy with the children; I never interfered with her in any way, I allowed her to do as she pleased with the children and the household! To be sure it was bad that she had been the governess in our own house; that was bad. There is something trivial and common in playing the gallant to one's own governess! But what a governess!"
He vividly recalled Mlle. Roland's black roguish eyes and her smile.
