LITMIR.BIZ

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knew all the details of his life. He wished to say that he had been up all night and had fallen asleep, but seeing her excited and happy face he felt ashamed. So he said that he had to go and report the Prince’s departure.

      ‘But now that is all over? He has gone?’

      ‘Yes, thank heaven! That is all over. You would hardly believe how intolerable it was.’

      ‘Why? Is it not the kind of life all you young men lead?’ she said, frowning; and taking up her crochet-work from the table began disentangling the hook without looking at Vronsky.

      ‘I have long since abandoned that kind of life,’ he said, wondering at the change in her face and trying to penetrate its meaning. ‘And I must own,’ he went on, smiling and showing his compact row of teeth, ‘that I seem to have been looking in a mirror the whole of this week while watching that kind of life, and it was very unpleasant.’ She held her work in her hands, without crocheting, gazing at him with a strange, glittering, unfriendly look.

      ‘Lisa called on me this morning; they still visit me in spite of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna,’ she said, ‘and she told me about your Athenian party. How disgusting!’

      ‘I was only going to say that …’

      She interrupted him.

      ‘It was Thérèse, whom you knew before?’

      ‘I was going to say …’

      ‘How horrid you men are! How is it that you can forget that a woman cannot forget these things?’ she said, getting more and more heated and thereby betraying the cause of her irritation. ‘Especially a woman who cannot know your life. What do I know? What did I know? Only what you tell me. And what proof have I that you tell me the truth?’

      ‘Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you believe me? Have I not told you that I have not a thought that I would hide from you?’

      ‘Yes, yes!’ she said, evidently trying to drive away her jealous thoughts. ‘But if you only knew how hard it is for me! I believe you, I do believe you… . Well, what were you going to say?’

      But he could not at once remember what he had wished to say. These fits of jealousy which had lately begun to repeat themselves more and more frequently, horrified him and, however much he tried to hide the fact, they made him feel colder toward her, although he knew that the jealousy was caused by love for him. How often he had told himself that to be loved by her was happiness! and now that she loved him as only a woman can for whom love outweighs all else that is good in life, he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past. She was not at all such as he had first seen her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and as she spoke of the actress there was a malevolent look on her face which distorted its expression. He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it. Yet in spite of this he felt that though at first while his love was strong he would have been able, had he earnestly desired it, to pull that love out of his heart — yet now when he imagined, as he did at that moment, that he felt no love for her, he knew that the bond between them could not be broken.

      ‘Well, what were you going to tell me about the Prince? I have driven away the demon,’ she added. They spoke of jealousy as ‘the demon’. ‘Yes, what had you begun telling me about the Prince? What was it you found so hard to bear?’

      ‘Oh, it was intolerable!’ he said, trying to pick up the lost thread of what he had in his mind. ‘He does not improve on nearer acquaintance. If I am to describe him, he is a finely-bred animal, like those that get prizes at cattle-shows, and nothing more,’ he concluded in a tone of vexation which awoke her interest.

      ‘Oh, but in what way?’ she rejoined. ‘Anyhow he must have seen much, and is well educated… .’

      ‘It is quite a different kind of education — that education of theirs. One can see that he has been educated only to have the right to despise education, as they despise everything except animal pleasures.’

      ‘But don’t all of you like those animal pleasures?’ she remarked, and he again noticed on her face that dismal look which evaded his.

      ‘Why do you take his part so?’ he said, smiling.

      ‘I don’t take his part, and it is a matter of complete indifference to me, but I should say that as you did not like these pleasures you might have declined to go. But it gives you pleasure to see Thérèse dressed as Eve …’

      ‘Again! Again the demon!’ said Vronsky, taking the hand which she had put on the table, and kissing it.

      ‘Yes, but I can’t help it! You don’t know how I have suffered while waiting for you! I don’t think I have a jealous nature. I am not jealous; I trust you when you are here near me; but when you are away, living your life, which I don’t understand …’

      She turned away from him and, managing at last to disentangle her hook, with the aid of her forefinger began to draw the stitches of white wool, shining in the lamplight, through each other, the delicate wrist moving rapidly and nervously within her embroidered cuff.

      ‘Well, and what happened? Where did you meet Alexis Alexandrovich?’ she suddenly asked, her voice ringing unnaturally.

      ‘I knocked up against him in the doorway.’

      ‘And he bowed like this to you?’ She drew up her face, half closed her eyes and quickly changed the expression of her face, folding her hands; and Vronsky saw at once upon her beautiful face the very look with which Karenin had bowed to him. He smiled, and she laughed merrily, with that delightful laughter from the chest which was one of her special charms.

      ‘I can’t at all understand him,’ said Vronsky. ‘Had he after your explanation in the country broken with you, had he challenged me, yes! But this sort of thing I do not understand. How can he put up with such a position? He suffers, that is evident.’

      ‘He?’ she said, sarcastically. ‘He is perfectly contented.’

      ‘Why are we all tormenting each other when everything might be so comfortable?’

      ‘But not he! As if I did not know him, and the falsehood with which he is saturated! … As if it were possible for anyone to live as he is living with me! He understands and feels nothing. Could a man who has any feelings live in the same house with his guilty wife? Could he talk to her and call her by her Christian name?’ And without meaning to, she again mimicked him: ‘Ma chère Anna; my dear!’

      ‘He is not a man, not a human being. He is … a doll! No one else knows it, but I do. Oh, if I were he, I should long since have killed, have torn in pieces, a wife such as I, and not have called her “Ma chère Anna”. He is not a man but an official machine. He does not understand that I am your wife, that he is a stranger, a superfluous … But don’t let us talk about him.’

      ‘You are unjust, unjust, my dear,’ said Vronsky, trying to pacify her. ‘But still, don’t let us talk about him. Tell me what you have been doing? What is the matter with you? What is that illness of yours? What does the doctor say?’

      She looked at him with quizzical joy. She had evidently remembered other comical and unpleasant sides of her husband’s character and waited for an opportunity to mention them.

      He continued:

      ‘I expect it is not illness at all, but only your condition. When is it to be?’

      The mocking light in her eyes faded, but a smile of a different kind — the knowledge of something unknown to him, and gentle

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