“If you care to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with the same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had been talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexey Alexandrovitch, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.

“She will never speak out about it. But one thing is possible, one thing she might desire,” he went on, “that is the cessation of your relations and all memories associated with them. To my thinking, in your position what’s essential is the formation of a new attitude to one another. And that can only rest on a basis of freedom on both sides.”

“Divorce,” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted, in a tone of aversion.