Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 27
Chapter 27
ANNA was upstairs, standing before the looking glass, and, with Annushka’s assistance,
pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she heard carriage wheels
crunching the gravel at the entrance.
“It’s too early for Betsy,” she thought, and glancing out of the window she caught
sight of the carriage and the black hat of Alexey Alexandrovitch, and the ears that
she knew so well sticking up each side of it. “How unlucky! Can he be going to
stay the night?” she wondered, and the thought of all that might come of such a
chance struck her as so awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a moment,
she went down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of the
presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that she had come to know
of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and began talking, hardly knowing what
she was saying.
“Ah, how nice of you!” she said, giving her husband her hand, and greeting
Sludin, who was like one of the family, with a smile. “You’re staying the night, I
hope?” was the first word the spirit of falsehood prompted her to utter; “and now
we’ll go together. Only it’s a pity I’ve promised Betsy. She’s coming for me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch knit his brows at Betsy’s name.
“Oh, I’m not going to separate the inseparables,” he said in his usual bantering
tone. “I’m going with Mihail Vassilievitch. I’m ordered exercise by the doctors too.
I’ll walk, and fancy myself at the springs again.”
“There’s no hurry,” said Anna. “Would you like tea?”
She rang.
“Bring in tea, and tell Seryozha that Alexey Alexandrovitch is here. Well, tell me,
how have you been? Mihail Vassilievitch, you’ve not been to see me before. Look
how lovely it is out on the terrace,” she said, turning first to one and then to the
other.
She spoke very simply and naturally, but too much and too fast. She was the more
aware of this from noticing in the inquisitive look Mihail Vassilievitch turned on her
that he was, as it were, keeping watch on her.
Mihail Vassilievitch promptly went out on the terrace.
She sat down beside her husband.
“You don’t look quite well,” she said.
“Yes,” he said; “the doctor’s been with me today and wasted an hour of my time.
I feel that some one of our friends must have sent him: my health’s so precious, it
seems.”
“No; what did he say?”
She questioned him about his health and what he had been doing, and tried to
persuade him to take a rest and come out to her.
All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar brilliance in her eyes. But
Alexey Alexandrovitch did not now attach any special significance to this tone of
194