It was easy to say all that, but impossible to execute it. The pain in his side was still annoying and seemed to be increasing and growing more constant; the taste in his mouth grew more and more queer,—he thought a disgusting smell came from his mouth,—and his appetite and his strength grew weaker and weaker. It was impossible for him to deceive himself: something terrible, new, and more significant than anything that had ever taken place in his life was now going on in him. He alone knew of it, and all those who surrounded him did not understand it, or did not wish to understand it, and thought that everything in the world was going on as before. That tormented him more than anything. His home folk, especially his wife and his daughter, who were in the very heat of calls, he saw, did not understand a thing about it and were annoyed because he was so cheerless and so exacting, as though it were his fault. Though they tried to conceal this, he saw that he was an obstacle to them, but that his wife had worked out for herself a certain relation to his disease and held on to it independently of what he said and did. This relation was like this:
"You know," she would say to her friends, "Iván Ilích, like all good people, is unable strictly to take the prescribed cure. To-day he will take the drops and eat what he is ordered to eat, and will go to bed early; to-morrow, if I do not watch him, he will forget to take the medicine, will eat some sturgeon (and he is not allowed to eat that), and will sit up playing vint until one o'clock.
"'When did I do it?' Iván Ilích will say in anger. Just this once at Peter Ivánovich's.'
"'And yesterday at Shébek's.'
"'It makes no difference, I cannot sleep from pain anyway.'
"'Whether from pain or from anything else, you will never get well this way, and you only torment us.'"
