XXIV.

“Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position, if possible,” said Dolly.

“Yes, if possible,” said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly different tone, subdued and mournful.

“Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband had consented to it.”

“Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Oh, we won’t then,” Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the expression of suffering on Anna’s face. “All I see is that you take too gloomy a view of things.”

“I? Not at all! I’m very satisfied and happy. You see, je fais passions. Veslovsky . . .”

“Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,” said Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.

“Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexei, and that’s all; but he’s a boy, and quite under control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just as it might be with your Grisha. . . . Dolly!” she suddenly changed the subject. “You say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.”

“But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.”

“But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexei, and say I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for what I think . . . because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me — divorce. In the first place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of Countess Lidia Ivanovna now.”

Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.

“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.

“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged him — and I consider him magnanimous — that I humiliate myself to write to him. . . . Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal, or consent. Well, I have received his consent, say . . .” Anna was at that moment at the farthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window. “I receive his consent, but my . . . my son? They won’t give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love equally, I think, but both more than myself, two beings — Seriozha and Alexei.”

She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.

“It is only those two beings whom I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything — anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.”

She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and, with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand.

“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she uttered, and turning away, she burst into tears.

Left alone, Dolly said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back the next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wineglass, and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.

When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew, staying so long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said:

“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”

“Oh, I’ve known her a long while. She’s very goodhearted, I suppose, mais excessivement terre-a-terre. Still, I’m very glad to see her.”

He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.

Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him.

Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses and his carriage with the patched mudguards, drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.

Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, after Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly grow weedy in the life she was leading.

As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how they had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip, expressed himself unasked:

“Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by cock-crow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now you could get from innkeepers for forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat.”

“The master’s a screw,” put in the countinghouse clerk.

“Well, did you like their horses?” asked Dolly.

“The horses! There’s no two opinions about them. And the food was good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t know what you thought,” he said, turning his handsome, good-natured face to her.

“I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?”

“Eh, we must!”

On reaching home and finding everyone entirely safe and particularly charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness telling them about her arrival, her warm reception, about the luxury and good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and about their recreations, and she would not allow a word to be said against them.

“One has to know Anna and Vronsky — I have got to know him better now — to see how fine they are, and how touching,” she said, speaking now with perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of dissatisfaction and awkwardness she had experienced there.