anxiety."
This extraneous attitude of Praskov'ya Thedorovna towards the sick man, as expressed to others and to himself, implied that the illness was all Ivan Il'ich's own fault, and was, in fact, a fresh unpleasantness which he was causing his wife. Ivan Il'ich felt indeed that this escaped her involuntarily, but it was none the easier to bear for all that
In the Courts, too, Ivan Il'ich observed, or thought he observed, the same strange sort of attitude taken up towards him. At one time it would seem to him as if they regarded him as a man whose place would soon be vacant; then all at once his friends would begin to joke with him about his faddiness, just as if that strange and terrible, unheard of thing that was going on within him, never ceasing to suck away at him, and irresistibly dragging him somewhither, was the most pleasant subject in the world for jesting. Schwarz especially irritated him by his sportiveness, vivacity, and comme il faut way of looking at things, reminding Ivan Il'ich of what he was himself ten years ago.
A party of friends would come and sit down with him to a game at cards, in the lightest, merriest of moods, and the cards would be sorted and dealt, and the usual jests would circulate, and suddenly Ivan Il'ich would be sensible of his sucking pain and of that bad taste in the mouth, and it would seem a barbarous thing to him that he could take any pleasure in the game under such circumstances.
They could all see how hard it was for him, and they would say to him: "We can stop if you are tired. You rest a bit."
