"Well, show the person up at once," said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request
impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did,
made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and
gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in
his large, sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a
personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain's widow,
Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had
forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he
wanted to forget--his wife.
"Ah, yes!" He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed
expression. "To go, or not to go!" he said to himself; and an inner voice told him
he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set
right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her
attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not
susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and
deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.
"It must be some time, though: it can't go on like this," he said, trying to give
himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it,
flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the
drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife's bedroom.
