Which sentence in this excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich suggests that Ivan Ilyich’s wife, Praskovya Fedorovna
, takes no responsibility for his illness?
Her attitude was this: "You know," she would say to her friends, "Ivan Ilyich can't do as other people do, and keep to the treatment prescribed for him. One day he'll take his drops and keep strictly to his diet and go to bed in good time, but the next day unless I watch him he'll suddenly forget his medicine, eat sturgeon—which is forbidden—and sit up playing cards till one o'clock in the morning."
"Oh, come, when was that?" Ivan Ilyich would ask in vexation. "Only once at Peter Ivanovich's."
"And yesterday with shebek."
"Well, even if I hadn't stayed up, this pain would have kept me awake."
"Be that as it may you'll never get well like that, but will always make us wretched."
Praskovya Fedorovna's attitude to Ivan Ilyich's illness, as she expressed it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault and was another of the annoyances he caused her. Ivan Ilyich felt that this opinion escaped her involuntarily—but that did not make it easier for him.
At the law courts too, Ivan Ilyich noticed, or thought he noticed, a strange attitude towards himself. It sometimes seemed to him that people were watching him inquisitively as a man whose place might soon be vacant. Then again, his friends would suddenly begin to chaff him in a friendly way about his low spirits, as if the awful, horrible, and unheard-of thing that was going on within him, incessantly gnawing at him and irresistibly drawing him away, was a very agreeable subject for jests.
