"No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always
knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to
spare her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him
that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past
life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before--now
these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt
woman. "I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there
was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.
It's not I that am to blame," he told himself, "but she. But I
have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me..."
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his
sentiments were as much changed as towards her, ceased to
interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the
question of in what way he could best, with most propriety and
comfort for himself, and thus with most justice, extricate
himself from the mud with which she had spattered him in her
fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and
useful existence.
"I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman
has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of
the difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall
find it," he said to himself, frowning more and more. "I'm not
the first nor the last." And to say nothing of historical
instances dating from the "Fair Helen" of Menelaus, recently
revived in the memory of all, a whole list of contemporary
examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the highest society
rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch's imagination. "Daryalov,
Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes, even
Dram, such an honest, capable fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin,
Sigonin," Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered. "Admitting that a
certain quite irrational _ridicule_ falls to the lot of these men,
yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt
sympathy for it," Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though
indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy for
misfortunes of that kind, but the more frequently he had heard of
instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands, the more
highly he had thought of himself. "It is a misfortune which may
befall anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only
thing to be done is to make the best of the position."
And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men
who had been in the same position that he was in.