she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But it would be better to get to sleep.”

Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.

“Anna, I must warn you,” he began.

“Warn me?” she said. “Of what?”

She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, either in the sound or the sense of her