A man has travelled away from home to attend to his recently deceased friend's final affairs, and suddenly finds himself snapped out of a what was seemingly a three year long trance where he believed his wife was the perfect woman. He contemplates his disgust for his wife as he walks down the street, thinking of how her attractive outer appearance is what tricked him into believing that her soul was also beautiful. He groans in embarrassment, remembering how much he had mindlessly adored and worshipped her for so long. He sees her now as a parasite, a sybarite. He's glad that his friend's death called him away from her so that he could think clear-headedly without being distracted by her beauty, or else he would never have realized how awful she was. He then wonders how she would adjust her life if he were to leave her. He amuses himself with the image of her flitting from lover to lover. He considers how he might escape their marriage, perhaps through death. But he laments that she would surely outlast him. He then decides to travel far away, to China or India. A year passes where he has adventured out of the country. He had telegrammed her a lie that "prolonged business" kept him away. It appeared that she had never responded to this telegram, which the man had complicated feelings about. While a small part of him admits it's possible that he simply missed her response while he was travelling, he preferred to convince himself that she never cared about him. While he felt a loss, he attributed it to his obsession with her beauty, rather than love. However, he occasionally felt pains of longing for her. Another year later, he finds out that she had died in childbirth the same day that he had decided that he hated her. He begins feeling immense guilt for the way that he had cursed her name and left her so brutally as she died giving birth to his child. He fell into a depression, and began hallucinating her presence around him. He began having delusions about her having travelled with him, and about her having told him that she would come to see him as if she were alive. When she of course never comes, he decides that he must go to her. He decisively opens a window to step out, and falls one hundred feet to his death.