Stiva, as yet unprepared to undertake the day’s obligations, bid his Class III come a bit closer, and then swiftly pressed three buttons below the rectangular screen centered in Small Stiva’s midsection. He sat back glumly in the I/Comfort/6, while every detail of his quarrel with his wife was displayed on Small Suva’s monitor, illuminating the hopelessness of Suva’s position and, worst of all, his own fault.

“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me,” Stepan Arkadyich moaned when the Memory ended. Small Stiva made a consoling chirp and piped, “Now, master: She might forgive you.”

Stiva waved off the words of consolation. “The most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault-all my fault, though I’m not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation.”

“Quite right,” Small Stiva agreed.

“Oh, oh, oh!” Stiva moaned in despair, while Small Stiva motored closer, angled his small, squattish frame 35 degrees forward at the midsection, and rubbed his domed head in a catlike gesture against his master’s belly. Stepan Arkadyich then re-cued the Memory on the monitor and stared desolately at the most unpleasant part: the first minute when, on coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had found his wife in her bedroom viewing the unlucky communiqué that revealed everything.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details, supervising the mécaniciennes, limited in her ideas, had been sitting perfectly still while the incriminating communiqué played on the monitor of her Class III, Dolichka, and looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indignation. Dolichka, despite the rounded simplicity of her forms, appeared equally distraught, and her perfectly circular peach-colored eyes glowed fiercely from her ovoid silver faceplate.