Bilíbin shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that not even he could help in that difficulty.
“Une maîtresse-femme! * That’s what is called putting things squarely. She would like to be married to all three at the same time,” thought he.
* A masterly woman.
“But tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?” Bilíbin asked, his reputation being so well established that he did not fear to ask so naïve a question. “Will he agree?”
“Oh, he loves me so!” said Hélène, who for some reason imagined that Pierre too loved her. “He will do anything for me.”
Bilíbin puckered his skin in preparation for something witty.
“Even divorce you?” said he.
Hélène laughed.
Among those who ventured to doubt the justifiability of the proposed marriage was Hélène’s mother, Princess Kurágina. She was continually tormented by jealousy of her daughter, and now that jealousy concerned a subject near to her own heart, she could not reconcile herself to the idea. She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of divorce and remarriage during a husband’s lifetime, and the priest told her that it was impossible, and to her delight showed her a text in the Gospel which (as it seemed to him) plainly forbids remarriage while the husband is alive.
Armed with these arguments, which appeared to her unanswerable, she drove to her daughter’s early one morning so as to find her alone.