and lying were opposed to his nature.
“It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said to Small Stiva, who said, “No no can’t go on no.” Thus encouraged, Stiva squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it and flung it into a Class I mother-of-pearl ashtray, which instantly and automatically filled with a half inch of water, extinguishing the smoldering butt. With rapid steps he walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife’s bedroom.
CHAPTER 4
DARYA ALEXANDROVNA, in a dressing jacket, with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful, hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, was standing before an open bureau among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room. Hearing her husband’s steps, she stopped, looking toward the door; Dolichka, by angling her linear eyebrows into a sharp V, gave her features a severe and contemptuous expression. Dolly and her companion android alike felt afraid of Stepan Arkadyich, and afraid of the coming interview. They were just attempting to do what they had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children’s things so as to take them to her mother’s—but again Darya Alexandrovna could not bring herself to do this. She said to Dolichka, as each time before, “Things cannot go on like this! I must take some step to punish him!” and as always Dolichka confirmed her in her opinions, supporting her in all things, exactly as it was the sole purpose of her existence to do.
“I shall leave him!” Dolly pronounced, and Dolickha in her metallic soprano echoed her: “Yes! Leave!” But Dolly knew in her heart of hearts what Dolichka, in the mechanical limitations of her imagination, could not understand: to leave him was impossible. It was impossible because Darya Alexandrovna could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, along with their several dozen Class IIs and countless Class Is, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all.
Seeing her husband, followed closely by the obnoxious oblong form of Small Stiva, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
“Dolly!” Stepan Arkadyich said in a subdued and timid voice, while Small Stiva bent at midline in a supplicating position toward Dolichka. In a rapid glance Dolly scanned her husband’s figure, and that of his robot. Man and machine both radiated health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she whispered to Dolichka, and the bitter confirmation came from the Class III’s Vox-Em, “Happy. Content.”
“While I . . . ,” Dolly continued, but her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
“What do you want?” Dolly said to her husband in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna and Android Karenina are coming today.”
“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see them!” she cried.
“But you must, really, Dolly . . .”
“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
The Galena Box, its simple external sensors attuned to those vocal tonalities indicative of emotional distress, reactuated, pulsing more rapidly.
Stepan Arkadyich could be calm when he thought of his wife, and could immerse himself in the news feed and drink the coffee that the II/Samovar/l(8) provided; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
“My God! What have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake! . . . You know . . .” He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat. “Might we . . .” he began, gesturing meaningfully at their two androids. Dolly gave an agitated nod, and both of the Class IIIs were sent into Surcease, with head units slightly forward and sensory circuits deactivated, to allow their masters their absolute privacy.
“Dolly, what can I say . . .?” He paused,