"I tremble at the thought that she will hear, will come out--a scene, hysterics, and no getting away in the future without a scene. By six o'clock everything has been packed after a fashion. I go to the stable to order the horses; Sasha and Varya finish the packing.... It is night, pitch dark. I get off the path to the lodge, fall into the bushes, get scratched, knock against trees, fall down, lose my cap, cannot find it; with difficulty make my way out, go home, take a cap, and with a lantern make my way to the stable and order the horses to be harnessed. Sasha, Dushan, Varya come. I tremble, expecting pursuit. But at last we get off. At Shtchekino we wait an hour, and every minute I expect her to appear. But at last we are in the railway carriage and set off. Alarm passes, and pity for her rises, but no doubt as to whether I have done what I ought. Perhaps I am mistaken in justifying myself but it seems to me that I have saved myself not as Leo Nikolaevitch, but have saved what at times at least to some small degree there is in me." CHAPTER VIII TOLSTOY'S RELATION TO HIS WIFE After his departure Leo Nikolaevitch never for a minute repented what he had done, and never considered the idea of his return to Sofya Andreyevna. When his daughter Alexandra Lvovna several days afterwards asked him whether he could regret his action, he answered: "Of course not. Can a man regret something when he _could not_ act differently?" And why he could not act differently he told her openly in his letter of the 29th October: "For me, with this spying, eavesdropping, everlasting reproaches, disposing of me according to caprice, everlasting control, pretence of hatred for the man who is nearest and most necessary to me, with this obvious hatred for me and affectation of love ... such a life is not merely unpleasant for me, but utterly impossible. If anyone is to drown oneself it is not she but I.... I desire one thing only, freedom from her, from the falsity, hypocrisy and malice with which her whole being is saturated.... All her behaviour to me not only shows a lack of love, but seems to have been unmistakably aimed at killing me...." These words broke from Leo Nikolaevitch like the irrepressible shriek from the tortured soul of a man who had for long years been accustomed to hide in himself the deepest and most poignant of his sufferings. And therefore after giving vent for once to his need to speak out to his favourite daughter, he at once hastens to comment: "You see, dear, how bad I am. I do not conceal myself from you."[22]