" The most difficult thing in that situation was that he simply could not connect and reconcile his past with what there was now. He had already suffered through the transition from that past to the knowledge of his wife's unfaithfulness; that state that been painful but comprehensible to him. If his wife, declaring her unfaithfulness, had then left him, he would have been grieved, unhappy, but he would not have been in this hopeless, incomprehensible situation which he now felt himself to be in. He simply could not reconcile his recent forgiveness, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife and another man's child, with what there was now - that is, when he, as if in reward for it all, found himself alone, disgraced, derided, needed by none and despised by all. "

― Leo Tolstoy