from the mud with which she had spattered him by her fall, how he would henceforth pursue his own path of honorable, active, and useful life.
"Must I make myself wretched because a wretched woman has committed a crime? All I want is to find the best way out from this situation to which she has brought me. And I will find it," he added, getting more and more indignant. "I am not the first, nor the last."
And not speaking of the historical examples, beginning with La Belle Hélène of Menelaus, which had recently been brought to all their memories by Offenbach's opera, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch went over in his mind a whole series of contemporary episodes, where husbands of the highest position had been obliged to mourn the faithlessness of their wives.
"Daryalof, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanof, Count Paskudin, Dramm, .... yes, even Dramm, honorable, industrious man as he is, .... Semenof, Chagin, Sigonin. Admit that they cast unjust ridicule on these men; as for me, I never saw anything except their misfortune, and I always pitied them," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch to himself, although this was not so, and he had never sympathized with misfortune of this sort, and had only plumed himself the more as he had heard of wives deceiving their husbands.
"This is a misfortune which is likely to strike any one, and now it has struck me. The only thing is to know how to find the best way of settling the difficulty."
And he began to recall the different ways in which these men, finding themselves in such a position as he was, had behaved.
"Daryalof fought a duel ...."
Dueling had often been a subject of consideration to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch when he was a young man, and for the reason that physically he was a timid man and he knew it. He could not think without a shudder of having a pistol leveled at him, and never in his life had he practised with firearms. This instinctive horror had in early life caused him often to think about duel-
