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Now, sitting on his bed, with vague thoughts crowding disorderedly in his head, he felt and realized clearly only one thing—that despite all yesterday’s “staggering impression” from this news, he was all the same very calm regarding the fact of her death. “Am I not even going to feel sorry about her?” he asked himself. True, he no longer felt hatred for her now and could judge more impartially, more justly about her. In his opinion, which, by the way, had been formed early on in this nine-year period of separation, Natalia Vassilievna belonged to the number of the most ordinary provincial ladies of “good” provincial society, and—“who knows, maybe that’s how it was, and only I alone made up such a fantasy out of her?” He had always suspected, however, that this opinion might contain an error; he felt it now, too. Besides, the facts contradicted it; this Bagautov had also had a liaison with her for several years, and, it seems, was also “under all her charms.” Bagautov was indeed a young man of the best Petersburg society and, being “a most empty man” (as Velchaninov said of him), could therefore make his career only in Petersburg. Now he had, nevertheless, neglected Petersburg—that is, his chiefest profit—and lost five years in T——solely on account of this woman! And he had finally returned to Petersburg, perhaps, only because he, too, had been discarded like “a worn-out old shoe.” So there was something extraordinary in this woman—a gift of attraction, enslavement, domination!
And yet it would seem that she had no means of attracting and enslaving: “she wasn’t even so beautiful, and perhaps simply wasn’t beautiful at all.” Velchaninov had met her when she was already twenty-eight years old. Her not very handsome face was able sometimes to be pleasantly animated; but her eyes were not nice: there was some u
Velchaninov was convinced that there indeed existed such a type of such women; but then, too, he was convinced that there existed a corresponding type of husband, whose sole purpose consisted of nothing but corresponding to this type of woman. In his opinion, the essence of such husbands lay in their being, so to speak, “eternal husbands,” or, better to say, in being only husbands in life and nothing else. “Such a man is born and develops solely in order to get married, and having married, to turn immediately into an appendage of his wife, even if it so happens that he happens to have his own indisputable character. The main feature of such a husband is—a well-known adornment. It is as impossible for him not to wear horns as it is for the sun not to shine; but he not only never knows it, but even can never find it out by the very laws of nature.” Velchaninov deeply believed that these two types existed and that Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky of T———was a perfect representative of one of them. Yesterday’s Pavel Pavlovich, naturally, was not the Pavel Pavlovich he had known in T———. He found the man incredibly changed, but Velchaninov also knew that he could not but have changed and that all this was perfectly natural; Mr. Trusotsky could be all he had been before only with his wife alive, but now this was only part of the whole, suddenly set free—that is, something astonishing and unlike anything else.
As for the Pavel Pavlovich of T———, this is what Velchaninov remembered and recalled about him now:
“Of course, in T———Pavel Pavlovich was only a husband” and nothing more. If, for instance, he was, on top of that, also an official, it was solely because for him the service, too, had turned, so to speak, into one of the duties of his married life; he served for the sake of his wife and her social position in T———, though he was in himself quite a zealous official. He was thirty-five years old then and possessed a certain fortune, even a not altogether small one. He did not show any particular ability in the service, nor inability either. He kept company with all that was highest in the province and was reputed to be on an excellent footing. Natalia Vassilievna was perfectly respected in T———; she, however, did not value that very much, accepting it as her due, but at home she always knew how to receive superbly, having trained Pavel Pavlovich as well that his ma