Finished: The Eternal Husband (Dostoevsky). A good story! I haven't read Dostoevsky since The Brother's Karamazov, so I was glad to read another of his good, albeit shorter, stories. The Eternal Husband is the story of a man who runs into the friend whose wife he had an affair with years before, and all that ensues upon discovering that the wife is dead and that there is a little girl who was born 8 months after the lover was asked to leave by the wife....dun dun dunnnn. There is sadness involved, and lots of drama. And, of course, there are a couple of well-placed surprises tossed in. I do love how the title is explained by Dostoevsky:

   She was faithful to her lover, but only as long as he did not bore her. She was fond of tormenting her lover, but she liked making up for it too. She was of a passionate, cruel and sensual type. She hated depravity and condemned it with exaggerated severity and--was herself depraved. No sort of fact could have made her recognize her own depravity....She is one of those women who is born to be unfaithful wives. Such women never become old maids; it's a law of their nature to be married to that end. The husband is the first lover, but never till after the wedding. No one gets married more adroitly and easily than this type of woman. For her first infidelity the husband is always to blame. And it is all accompanied by the most perfect sincerity: to the end they feel themselves absolutely right and, of course, entirely innocent.
   Velchaninov was convinced that there really was such a type of woman; but, on the other hand, he was also convinced that there was a type of husband corresponding to that woman, whose sole vocation was to correspond with that feminine type. To his mind, the essence of such a husband lay in his being, so to say, "the eternal husband" or rather in being, all his life, a husband and nothing more. Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife, even when he happens to have unmistakable character of his own. the chief sign of such a husband is a certain decoration. He can no more escape wearing horns than the sun can help shining; he is not only unaware of the fact, but is bound by the very laws of his nature to be unaware of it. 

I think my next Dostoevsky will be Crime and Punishment! But I'm not ready to read it yet. :-)