Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 8
lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knickknacks
of her writing table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir
to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially
at the parquet of the lighted dining room, he halted and said to himself, “Yes, this
I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.”
And he turned back again. “But express what–what decision?” he said to himself
in the drawing room, and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before
turning into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long
while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they
please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her,” he told himself as
he went into her boudoir; but this dictum, which had always had such weight with
him before, had now no weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door
he turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing room some inner voice
told him that it was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was
something. And he said to himself again in the dining room, “Yes, I must decide
and put a stop to it, and express my view of it...” And again at the turn in the drawing
room he asked himself, “Decide how?” And again he asked himself, “What had
occurred?” and answered, “Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting
to his wife; but again in the drawing room he was convinced that something
had happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without
coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in
her boudoir.
There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at the top and
an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began to think of her, of
what she was thinking and feeling. For the first time he pictured vividly to himself
her personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the idea that she could and should have
a separate life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel
it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought
and feeling in another person’s place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey
Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous
abuse of the fancy.
“And the worst of it all,” thought he, “is that just now, at the very moment when
my great work is approaching completion” (he was thinking of the project he was
bringing forward at the time), “when I stand in need of all my mental peace and
all my energies, just now this stupid worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to
be done? I’m not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without
having the force of character to face them.
“I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out of my mind,” he said aloud.
“The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing in her soul,
that’s not my affair; that’s the affair of her conscience, and falls under the head of religion,”
he said to himself, feeling consolation in the sense that he had found to which
division of regulating principles this new circumstance could be properly referred.
“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her feelings,
and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can have nothing to do.
My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the family, I am a person bound in duty
to guide her, and consequently, in part the person responsible; I am bound to point
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