"Why, have you forgotten Matilda so soon?"
"Do you call that soon? It's more than five years."
"But you told me that you had been in love with her a considerable time after you came to this country. Will you forget me so soon, too?"
I squirmed, I writhed. "Don't be tormenting me, dearest," I implored, my voice quavering with impatience. "I love thee and nobody else."
She fell into a muse. Then she said, with a far-away look in her eyes: "I don't know where this will land me. It seems as if a great misfortune had befallen me. But I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. Come what may. I can't help it. At last I know what it means to be happy. I have been dreaming of it all my life. Now I know what it is like, and I am willing to suffer for it. Yes, I am willing to suffer for you, Levinsky." She spoke with profound, even-voiced earnestness, with peculiar solemnity, as though chanting a prayer. I was somewhat bored. Presently she paused, and, changing her tone, she asked. "Matilda talked to you of education. She wanted you to be an educated man, did she? Yes, but what did she do for you? She drank your blood, the leech, and when she got tired of it she dropped you. A woman like that ought to be torn to pieces. May every bit of the suffering she caused you come back to her a thousandfold. May her blood be shed as she shed yours." Suddenly she checked herself and said: "But, no, I am not going to curse her. I don't want you to think badly of her. Your love must be sacred, Levinsky. If you ever go back on me and love somebody else, don't let her curse me. Don't let anybody say a cross word about me." Max came home after midnight and I did not see him until the next evening.
When we met at supper (Dora was out at that moment) I had to make an effort to meet his eye. But he did not seem to notice anything out of the usual, and my awkwardness soon wore off
Nor, indeed, was there any change in my feelings toward him. I had expected that he would now be hateful to me. He was not. He was absolutely the same man as he had always been, except, perhaps, that I vaguely felt like a thief in his presence. Only I hated to think of Dora while I looked at him
Presently Dora made her appearance. My embarrassment returned, more acute than ever. The consciousness of her confusion and, above all, the consciousness of the three of us being together, was insupportable. It was a terrible repast, though Max was absolutely unaware of anything unnatural in our demeanor. I retired to my room soon after supper
I had a what-not half filled with books, so I drew a volume from it. I found it difficult to get my mind on it. My thoughts were circling round Dora and Max, round my precarious happiness, round the novelty of carrying on a romantic conspiracy with a married woman. Dora was so dear to me. I seemed to be vibrating with devotion to her. Regardless of the fact that she was somebody else's wife and a mother of two children, my love impressed me as something sacred. I seemed to accept the general rule that a wife-stealer is a despicable creature, a thief, a vile, immoral wretch. But now, that I was not facing Max, that rule, somehow, did not apply to my relations with Dora.
Simultaneously with this feeling I had another one which excused my conduct on the theory that everybody was at the bottom of his heart likewise ready to set that rule at defiance and to make a mistress of his friend's wife, provided it could be done with absolute secrecy and safety. Max in my place would certainly not have scrupled to act as I did. But then I hated to think of him in this connection. I would brush all thoughts of him aside as I would a vicious fly. I was too selfish to endure the pain even of a moment's compunction. I treated myself as a doting mother does a wayward son