way.

     Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had 

discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, 

who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her 

husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This 

position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and 

wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were 

painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no 

sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by 

chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the 

members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not 

leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The 

children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the 

housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new 

situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at 

dinner-time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

     Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky -- 

Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world -- woke up at his usual hour, 

that is, at eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the 

leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for

person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; 

he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; 

but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.