Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 21
The mare’s excitement had infected Vronsky. He felt that his heart was throbbing,
and that he, too, like the mare, longed to move, to bite; it was both dreadful and
delicious.
“Well, I rely on you, then,” he said to the Englishman; “half-past six on the
ground.”
“All right,” said the Englishman. “Oh, where are you going, my lord?” he asked
suddenly, using the title “my lord,” which he had scarcely ever used before.
Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how to stare, not
into the Englishman’s eyes, but at his forehead, astounded at the impertinence of his
question. But realizing that in asking this the Englishman had been looking at him
not as an employer, but as a jockey, he answered:
“I’ve got to go to Bryansky’s; I shall be home within an hour.”
“How often I’m asked that question today!” he said to himself, and he blushed, a
thing which rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked gravely at him; and,
as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going, he added:
“The great thing’s to keep quiet before a race,” said he; “don’t get out of temper or
upset about anything.”
“All right,” answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his carriage, he told the
man to drive to Peterhof.
Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening
rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain.
“What a pity!” thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage. “It was
muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp.” As he sat in solitude in the closed
carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note, and read them
through.
Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone, his mother, his brother,
everyone thought fit to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused
in him a feeling of angry hatred–a feeling he had rarely known before. “What business
is it of theirs? Why does everybody feel called upon to concern himself about
me? And why do they worry me so? Just because they see that this is something
they can’t understand. If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would
have left me alone. They feel that this is something different, that this is not a mere
pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than life. And this is incomprehensible,
and that’s why it annoys them. Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made
it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,” he said, in the word we linking himself
with Anna. “No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven’t an idea of what
happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness
nor unhappiness–no life at all,” he thought.
He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul
that they, all these people, were right. He felt that the love that bound him to Anna
was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass,
leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He
felt all the torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them,
conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying
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