Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its

own way.



Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had

discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French

girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced

to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with

him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only

the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family

and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the

house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that

the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in

common with one another than they, the members of the family and

household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the

husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all

over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper,

and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for

her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time;

the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.



Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch

Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at

his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his

wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned

over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he

would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow

on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped

up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.



“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how

was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not

Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in

America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the

tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_—not _Il mio tesoro_ though, but something

better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and

they were women, too,” he remembered.



Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a

smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that

was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even

expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light

peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his

feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his

slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on

gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine

years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place

where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he

suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in

his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his

brows.



“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had

happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was

present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and

worst of all, his own fault.



“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most

awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m

not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.

“Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the

acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.



Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and

good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his

wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise

had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her

bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.



She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,

and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still

with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of

horror, despair, and indignation.



“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.



And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case,

was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he

had met his wife’s words.



There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when

they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not

succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed

towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt,

denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining

indifferent even—anything would have been better than what he did

do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected

Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—utterly involuntarily

assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.



This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that

smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her

characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the

room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.



“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan

Arkadyevitch.



“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to himself in

despair, and found no answer.