Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 15
go where? When? Whom to take with me? Yes, to Moscow by the evening train.
Annushka and Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must write
to them both.” She went quickly indoors into her boudoir, sat down at the table,
and wrote to her husband:–”After what has happened, I cannot remain any longer
in your house. I am going away, and taking my son with me. I don’t know the law,
and so I don’t know with which of the parents the son should remain; but I take him
with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous, leave him to me.”
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal to his generosity, a
quality she did not recognize in him, and the necessity of winding up the letter with
something touching, pulled her up. “Of my fault and my remorse I cannot speak,
because...”
She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas. “No,” she said to herself,
“there’s no need of anything,” and tearing up the letter, she wrote it again, leaving
out the allusion to generosity, and sealed it up.
Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. “I have told my husband,” she wrote,
and she sat a long while unable to write more. It was so coarse, so unfeminine.
“And what more am I to write to him?” she said to herself. Again a flush of shame
spread over her face; she recalled his composure, and a feeling of anger against him
impelled her to tear the sheet with the phrase she had written into tiny bits. “No need
of anything,” she said to herself, and closing her blotting-case she went upstairs, told
the governess and the servants that she was going that day to Moscow, and at once
set to work to pack up her things.
272