"Checkov, Anton - The Wife And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chekhov Anton)

up and followed her.

"You will go upstairs to your own rooms this minute," she said.

"You are ill-bred," I said to her.

"You will go upstairs to your own rooms this very minute," she
repeated sharply, and she looked into my face with hatred.

She was standing so near that if I had stooped a lit tle my beard
would have touched her face.

"What is the matter?" I asked. "What harm have I done all at
once?"

Her chin quivered, she hastily wiped her eyes, and, with a
cursory glance at the looking-glass, whispered:

"The old story is beginning all over again. Of course you won't
go away. Well, do as you like. I'll go away myself, and you
stay."

We returned to the drawing-room, she with a resolute face, while
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to smile. There were some more
visitors -- an elderly lady and a young man in spectacles.
Without greeting the new arrivals or taking leave of the others,
I went off to my own rooms.

After what had happened at tea and then again downstairs, it
became clear to me that our "family happiness," which we had
begun to forget about in the course of the last two years, was
through some absurd and trivial reason beginning all over again,
and that neither I nor my wife could now stop ourselves; and that
next day or the day after, the outburst of hatred would, as I
knew by experience of past years, be followed by something
revolting which would upset the whole order of our lives. "So it
seems that during these two years we have grown no wiser, colder,
or calmer," I thought as I began walking about the rooms. "So
there will again be tears, outcries, curses, packing up, going
abroad, then the continual sickly fear that she will disgrace me
with some coxcomb out there, Italian or Russian, refusing a
passport, letters, utter loneliness, missing her, and in five
years old age, grey hairs." I walked about, imagining what was
really impossible -- her, grown handsomer, stouter, embracing a
man I did not know. By now convinced that that would certainly
happen, "'Why," I asked myself, "Why, in one of our long past
quarrels, had not I given her a divorce, or why had she not at
that time left me altogether? I should not have had this yearning
for her now, this hatred, this anxiety; and I should have lived
out my life quietly, working and not worrying about anything."