During these meetings I could not easily fall asleep, in a strange bed, but this time I fell asleep at once. And, as sometimes happens, you know, you feel a kind of electric shock and you wake up. So I awoke. I awoke with the thought of her, of my carnal love for her, and of Trukhachévski, and that everything was at an end between him and her. Terror and rage compressed my heart. But I began to reason with myself. 'What nonsense,' said I to myself, 'there is no cause for it,—there is nothing and has been nothing. And how can I so lower her and myself, by supposing such horrors? He—something in the nature of a hired fiddler, known as a worthless man, and a worthy woman, a respected mother of a family, my wife! What absurdity!' was what presented itself to me on one side. 'Why can't it be?' was what presented itself on the other. 'Why could there not be that simplest and most intelligible thing in the name of which I married her, the same thing in the name of which I lived with her, which alone I needed in her, and which, therefore, others could need, and that musician, too? He is unmarried, healthy (I remembered how he crunched the gristle in the cutlet and with what eager red lips he clasped the wine-glass), well-fed, smooth, and not only unprincipled, but obviously following the rule to make use of every pleasure which presents itself. And between them there is the bond of music, of the most refined sensual lust. What can keep him back? She? Who is she? She is the same mystery she has always been. I do not know her. I know her only as an animal. And nothing can nor must keep back an animal.'
"Only then for the first time did I recall their faces on that evening, when, after the Kreutzer Sonata, they played some impassioned piece,—I do not remember by whom,—impassioned to the point of obscenity. 'How could I have left?' I said to myself, recalling their faces. 'Was it not clear that everything had taken place between
