For the first time he pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the idea that she could and should have a separate life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel it.

It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into.

To put himself in thought and feeling in another person's place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch.

He looked on this spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.