Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 22
“Why do you tell me that?” she said. “Do you suppose I can doubt it? If I
doubted...”
“Who’s that coming?” said Vronsky suddenly, pointing to two ladies walking
towards them. “Perhaps they know us!” and he hurriedly turned off, drawing her
after him into a side path.
“Oh, I don’t care!” she said. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied that her eyes
looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. “I tell you that’s not the point–I
can’t doubt that; but see what he writes to me. Read it.” She stood still again.
Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her husband,
Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away by the natural sensation
aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband. Now while he held
his letter in his hands, he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would
most likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the
same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment he
would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself fired into the air. And
at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had
just said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning–that it was
better not to bind himself –and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.
Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no determination
in them. She saw at once that he had been thinking about it before by himself. She
knew that whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought. And she
knew that her last hope had failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning
on.
“You see the sort of man he is,” she said, with a shaking voice; “he...”
“Forgive me, but I rejoice at it,” Vronsky interrupted. “For God’s sake, let me
finish!” he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time to explain his words. “I
rejoice, because things cannot, cannot possibly remain as he supposes.”
“Why can’t they?” Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously attaching no
sort of consequence to what he said. She felt that her fate was sealed.
Vronsky meant that after the duel–inevitable, he thought– things could not go on
as before, but he said something different.
“It can’t go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope“– he was confused,
and reddened–”that you will let me arrange and plan our life. Tomorrow...” he was
beginning.
She did not let him go on.
“But my child!” she shrieked. “You see what he writes! I should have to leave
him, and I can’t and won’t do that.”
“But, for God’s sake, which is better?–leave your child, or keep up this degrading
position?”
“To whom is it degrading?”
“To all, and most of all to you.”
“You say degrading...don’t say that. Those words have no meaning for me,” she
said in a shaking voice. She did not want him now to say what was untrue. She had
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