being accomplished between them. Horror and rage compressed my heart. But I began to reason with myself. ‘What nonsense!’ said I to myself. ‘There are no grounds to go on, there is nothing and there has been nothing. How can I so degrade her and myself as to imagine such horrors? He is a sort of hired violinist, known as a worthless fellow, and suddenly an honourable woman, the respected mother of a family, my wife. … What absurdity!’ So it seemed to me on the one hand. ‘How could it help being so?’ it seemed on the other. ‘How could that simplest and most intelligible thing help happening—that for the sake of which I married her, for the sake of which I have been living with her, what alone I wanted of her, and which others including this musician must therefore also want? He is an unmarried man, healthy (I remember how he crunched the gristle of a cutlet and how greedily his red lips clung to the glass of wine), well fed, plump, and not merely unprincipled but evidently making it a principle to accept the pleasures that present themselves. And they have music, that most exquisite voluptuousness of the senses, as a link between them. What then could make him refrain? She? But who is she? She was, and still is, a mystery. I don’t know her. I only know her as an animal. And nothing can or should restrain an animal.’
“Only then did I remember their faces that evening when, after the Kreutzer Sonata , they played some impassioned little piece, I don’t remember by whom, impassioned to the point of obscenity. ‘How dared I go away?’ I asked myself, remembering their faces. Was it not clear that everything had happened between them that evening? Was it not evident already then that there was not only no barrier between them, but that they both, and she chiefly, felt a certain measure of shame after what had happened? I remember her weak, piteous, and beatific smile as she wiped the perspiration from her flushed face when I came up to the piano. Already then they avoided looking at one another, and only at supper when she was pouring out some water for her, they glanced at each other with the vestige of a smile. I now recalled with horror the glance and