“Hem … hem …” Pierre growled, wrinkling up his face, and neither looking at her nor stirring a muscle.

“And how came you to believe that he’s my lover? … Eh? Because I like his society? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should prefer yours.”

“Don’t speak to me … I beseech you,” Pierre muttered huskily.

“Why shouldn’t I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you boldly that it’s not many a wife who with a husband like you wouldn’t have taken a lover, but I haven’t done it,” she said. Pierre tried to say something, glanced at her with strange eyes, whose meaning she did not comprehend, and lay down again. He was in physical agony at that moment; he felt a weight on his chest so that he could not breathe. He knew that he must do something to put an end to this agony but what he wanted to do was too horrible.

“We had better part,” he articulated huskily.

“Part, by all means, only if you give me a fortune,” said Ellen. … “Part—that’s a threat to frighten me!”

Pierre leaped up from the couch and rushed staggering towards her.

“I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and snatching up a marble slab from a table with a strength he had not known in himself till then, he made a step towards her and waved it at her.

Ellen’s face was terrible to see; she shrieked and darted away from him. His father’s nature showed itself in him. Pierre felt the abandonment and the fascination of frenzy. He flung down the slab, shivering it into fragments, and with open arms swooping down upon Ellen, screamed “Go!” in a voice so terrible that they heard it all over the house with horror. God knows what Pierre would have done at that moment if Ellen had not run out of the room.

A week later Pierre had made over to his wife the revenue from all his estates in Great Russia, which made up the larger half of his property, and had gone away alone to Petersburg.