Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 2
to submit to anything–he had long ceased to think that their tie might end as he had
thought then. His ambitious plans had retreated into the background again, and
feeling that he had got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite,
he had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding him more
and more closely to her.
He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating footsteps. He
knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to
the drawing room.
“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came
into her eyes. “No; if things are to go on like this, the end will come much, much too
soon.”
“What is it, dear one?”
“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours...No, I won’t...I can’t
quarrel with you. Of course you couldn’t come. No, I won’t.” She laid her two
hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate,
and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the
time she had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of
him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as
he really was.
333