All that seemed so simple to Stepan Arkadyevitch, Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of times.

And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly impossible.

Divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a fictitious charge of adultery, and still more suffering his wife, pardoned and beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame.