Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 8
Chapter 8
ALEXEY Alexandrovitch had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his
wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager conversation with him
about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared something
striking and improper, and for that reason it seemed to him too to be improper. He
made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife.
On reaching home Alexey Alexandrovitch went to his study, as he usually did,
seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the Papacy at the place where he
had laid the paper-knife in it, and read till one o’clock, just as he usually did. But
from time to time he rubbed his high forehead and shook his head, as though to drive
away something. At his usual time he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna
Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under his arm he went upstairs. But
this evening, instead of his usual thoughts and meditations upon official details, his
thoughts were absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected with her.
Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to walking up and down
the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He could not go to bed, feeling
that it was absolutely needful for him first to think thoroughly over the position that
had just arisen.
When Alexey Alexandrovitch had made up his mind that he must talk to his wife
about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But now, when he began to
think over the question that had just presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated
and difficult.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was
an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife. Why one
ought to have confidence– that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife
would always love him–he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of
confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have
it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one
ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to
face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his
wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational
and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch
had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And
every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he
experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice
by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a
chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey
Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of
the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.
He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding
parquet of the dining room, where one lamp was burning, over the carpet
of the dark drawing room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait
of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles burned,
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