Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 32
Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues against the work
of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, as she had that day to be at
the meeting of some society and also at the Slavonic committee.
“It was all the same before, of course; but why was it I didn’t notice it before?”
Anna asked herself. “Or has she been very much irritated today? It’s really ludicrous;
her object is doing good; she a Christian, yet she’s always angry; and she always
has enemies, and always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing good.”
After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a chief secretary,
who told her all the news of the town. At three o’clock she too went away, promising
to come to dinner. Alexey Alexandrovitch was at the ministry. Anna, left alone, spent
the time till dinner in assisting at her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents)
and in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters
which had accumulated on her table.
The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and her excitement,
too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of her life she felt
again resolute and irreproachable.
She recalled with wonder her state of mind on the previous day. “What was it?
Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put a stop to, and I answered
as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary
and out of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to what has no
importance.” She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost
a declaration made her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s subordinates,
and how Alexey Alexandrovitch had answered that every woman living
in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest confidence
in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by jealousy. “So then there’s no
reason to speak of it? And indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she told
herself.
103