What is to be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky

At the end of two weeks, while Lopukhóf was sitting in the counting-room of his factory, Viéra Pavlovna was spending the whole morning in extraordinary excitement. She threw herself down on her bed, she covered her face with her hands; and at the end of a quarter of an hour she jumped up, walked up and down the room, threw herself into one chair after another, and again walked with quick, unsteady steps, and then again threw herself on her bed, and then walked again; and several times she went to the writing-desk, and stood by it, and turned away, and finally she sat down, wrote a few words, sealed her note. Then, in half an hour, she seized the note, tore it up, burned it, and again she walked about excitedly. She wrote a second letter; this, also, she tore up and burned. Again she walked up and down, and again she wrote, and hastily, scarcely stopping to seal it; not giving herself time to write the address, she ran off with it to her husband's room, threw it on the table, and hurried back to her own room, fell into a chair, and sat motionless, hiding her face in her hands, half an hour, possibly an hour. There is the sound of the bell; it is he. She ran into the library to seize the letter, to tear it up, to burn it -- but where is it? It is not there! where is it? She hastily looked over the papers; where is it? But Masha is already opening the door, and Lopukhóf saw from the threshold how Viéra Pavlovna flashed out from his library into her own room, excited and pale.

He did not follow her, but went straight into his library; coolly, at his leisure, he examined the table and the space behind the table. Yes; he had been expecting for some days some such thing, either in the way of words or note. Nu, here it is, a letter without address, but her seal; nu, she must have been looking for it, so as to destroy it, or she may have just thrown it down. No, she must have been looking for it; the papers are in disorder. But how could she find it, while in throwing it down she had been in such a flurry of excitement that, in being thrown impetuously down, like a coal burning the hand, it slid across the whole width of the table, and fell on the window behind the table? There is hardly need of reading it; the contents are what he expects. However, it is impossible not to read it.