Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 13
Chapter 13
NONE but those who were most intimate with Alexey Alexandrovitch knew that,
while on the surface the coldest and most reasonable of men, he had one weakness
quite opposed to the general trend of his character. Alexey Alexandrovitch
could not hear or see a child or woman crying without being moved. The sight of
tears threw him into a state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of reflection.
The chief secretary of his department and his private secretary were aware
of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no account to give
way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their chances. “He will get angry, and will
not listen to you,” they used to say. And as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance
set up in Alexey Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found expression in
hasty anger. “I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!” he would commonly cry in
such cases.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her relations with Vronsky,
and immediately afterwards had burst into tears, hiding her face in her hands,
Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the
same time of a rush of that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears.
Conscious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that minute
would be out of keeping with the position, he tried to suppress every manifestation
of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked at her. This was what had
caused that strange expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed
Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage, and making
an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his usual urbanity, and uttered that
phrase that bound him to nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his
decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel pang to the
heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensified by the strange feeling of
physical pity for her set up by her tears. But when he was all alone in the carriage
Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from
this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after suffering
long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger
than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in
his own good luck, feels all at once that what has so long poisoned his existence and
enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and
take interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch
was experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible, but now it was over; he
felt that he could live again and think of something other than his wife.
“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and always
saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said to himself. And it
actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past
life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before–now these incidents proved
clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. “I made a mistake in linking my
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