Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 15
study in morals. I shall expect you,” she finished.
Anna read the note and heaved a deep sigh.
“Nothing, I need nothing,” she said to Annushka, who was rearranging the bottles
and brushes on the dressing table. “You can go. I’ll dress at once and come down. I
need nothing.”
Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in the same position,
her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every now and then she shivered
all over, seemed as though she would make some gesture, utter some word, and
sank back into lifelessness again. She repeated continually, “My God! my God!” But
neither “God” nor “my” had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her
difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch
himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had
been brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible only upon
condition of renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life. She was
not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never
experienced before, in which she found herself. She felt as though everything were
beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to overtired
eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for.
Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen,
and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.
“Ah, what am I doing!” she said to herself, feeling a sudden thrill of pain in both
sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was holding her hair
in both hands, each side of her temples, and pulling it. She jumped up, and began
walking about.
“The coffee is ready, and mademoiselle and Seryozha are waiting,” said Annushka,
coming back again and finding Anna in the same position.
“Seryozha? What about Seryozha?” Anna asked, with sudden eagerness, recollecting
her son’s existence for the first time that morning.
“He’s been naughty, I think,” answered Annushka with a smile.
“In what way?”
“Some peaches were lying on the table in the corner room. I think he slipped in
and ate one of them on the sly.”
The recollection of her son suddenly roused Anna from the helpless condition in
which she found herself. She recalled the partly sincere, though greatly exaggerated,
rôle of the mother living for her child, which she had taken up of late years, and she
felt with joy that in the plight in which she found herself she had a support, quite
apart from her relation to her husband or to Vronsky. This support was her son. In
whatever position she might be placed, she could not lose her son. Her husband
might put her to shame and turn her out, Vronsky might grow cold to her and go
on living his own life apart (she thought of him again with bitterness and reproach);
she could not leave her son. She had an aim in life. And she must act; act to secure
this relation to her son, so that he might not be taken from her. Quickly indeed, as
quickly as possible, she must take action before he was taken from her. She must
take her son and go away. Here was the one thing she had to do now. She needed
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