Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 16
law he can. But I know very well why he says it. He doesn’t believe even in my
love for my child, or he despises it (just as he always used to ridicule it). He despises
that feeling in me, but he knows that I won’t abandon my child, that I can’t abandon
my child, that there could be no life for me without my child, even with him whom I
love; but that if I abandoned my child and ran away from him, I should be acting like
the most infamous, basest of women. He knows that, and knows that I am incapable
of doing that.”
She recalled another sentence in the letter. “Our life must go on as it has done in
the past....” “That life was miserable enough in the old days; it has been awful of
late. What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows that I can’t repent that I
breathe, that I love; he knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he
wants to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy in
deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won’t give him that happiness. I’ll
break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants to catch me, come what may.
Anything’s better than lying and deceit.
“But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so miserable as I am?...”
“No; I will break through it, I will break through it!” she cried, jumping up and
keeping back her tears. And she went to the writing table to write him another
letter. But at the bottom of her heart she felt that she was not strong enough to break
through anything, that she was not strong enough to get out of her old position,
however false and dishonorable it might be.
She sat down at the writing table, but instead of writing she clasped her hands
on the table, and, laying her head on them, burst into tears, with sobs and heaving
breast like a child crying. She was weeping that her dream of her position being
made clear and definite had been annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that
everything would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way.
She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to
her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was precious to her,
that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful position of
a woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however
much she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never
know freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of
detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake of
a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her, whose life she
could never share. She knew that this was how it would be, and at the same time it
was so awful that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried
without restraint, as children cry when they are punished.
The sound of the footman’s steps forced her to rouse herself, and, hiding her face
from him, she pretended to be writing.
“The courier asks if there’s an answer,” the footman announced.
“An answer? Yes,” said Anna. “Let him wait. I’ll ring.”
“What can I write?” she thought. “What can I decide upon alone? What do I
know? What do I want? What is there I care for?” Again she felt that her soul was
beginning to be split in two. She was terrified again at this feeling, and clutched at
the first pretext for doing something which might divert her thoughts from herself.
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